States of Repair: The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British Novel

States of Repair offers a new literary history of the Second World War and its aftermath by focusing on wartime visions of rebuilding Britain. Beginning with the promise of the 1942 Beveridge Report to care for citizens from the “cradle to the grave,” the welfare state envisioned that managing individuals’ private lives would result in a more coherent and equitable community. Literature, particularly the novel, records this historic transition in order to narrate its transformative social potential and darker failures. From midcentury works by Elizabeth Bowen, Sam Selvon, and Muriel Spark, to contemporary works by Alan Hollinghurst, Michael Ondaatje, and Kazuo Ishiguro, literature keeps enshrining 1945 as an index, even engine, of contemporaneity. 

Oxford University Press, Mid-Century Studies Series, November 2023 || publisher’s website

[image: Grayson Perry, “Battle of Britain,” 2017]