The 1950s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction

How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 1950s shape modern British fiction?

As Britain emerged from the shadow of war into the new decade of the 1950s, the seeds of profound social change were being sown. Exploring the full range of fiction in the 1950s, this volume surveys the ways in which these changes were reflected in British culture. Chapters cover the rise of the ’Angry Young Men’, an emerging youth culture and vivid new voices from immigrant and feminist writers.

A major critical re-evaluation of the decade, the book covers such writers as Margery Allingham, Kingsley Amis, E. R. Braithwaite, Rodney Garland, Martyn Goff, Attia Hosain, George Lamming, Marghanita Laski, Doris Lessing, Colin MacInnes, Naomi Mitchison, V. S. Naipaul, Barbara Pym, Mary Renault, Sam Selvon, Alan Sillitoe, John Sommerfield, Muriel Spark, J. R. R. Tolkien, Angus Wilson and John Wyndham.

Nick Bentley is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Keele University, UK. He is author of Contemporary British Fiction (2018) and Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (2007) and editor of British Fiction of the 1990s (2005).

Alice Ferrebe is Subject Leader for English Literature at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. She is author of Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction, 1950-2000 (2005) and Literature of the 1950s: Good, Brave Causes (2012).

Nick Hubble is Reader in English at Brunel University London, UK, and author of Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, Theory, History (2006) and The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (2017).