Introduction: After Modernism?

This special issue of the Cambridge Quarterly looks at the literary history of the richly ambiguous middle decades of the twentieth century. Our title – After Modernism? – deliberately takes the form of a question. It suggests a hesitation, an awkward moment, a great expectation reluctantly abandoned. The six essays gathered here address the work of an extended generation of major English-Irish writers: W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, George Orwell, John Betjeman, Philip Larkin and Elizabeth Taylor. Growing up among stifled memories of a great war, coming to maturity in the shadow of another, surviving that ordeal to face the ever more apocalyptic idea of a third, this generation variously re-discovered the potent virtues of the national-popular. They emerge, in 1945, chastened yet still dissenting, to chronicle, to question and to satirise a world of Coronation, Cold War and somnolent consumerism.