Movement Fiction and Englishness

The writers associated with the Movement helped to promote a notion of Englishness sometimes characterised as regressive or reactionary. They did so in their poems but also in their fiction and reviewing. In the novels of Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, John Wain, and D. J. Enright, particularly those written in the 1940s and 1950s when the group came to prominence, the connections between nationalism and literary health are more subtly anatomised than is conventionally thought. The novels are worth returning to not only for their influence on post-war British fiction but for the light they shed on questions still very much alive today.