ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on key concepts discussed in preceding chapters of this book. The book examines some of the literary representations of the Blitz, we find little mythmaking and certainly no propagandist celebration of strange' and fantastic' behaviour but an emphasis on simulacra of behaviour'. In the war fiction of Virginia Woolf, Stevie Smith, Graham Greene, Henry Green and Elizabeth Bowen, war is the uncanny. The iconography of the Second World War reflects the modernity of a total war that mobilizes civilians and threatens populations from the air. Trench imagery was not replaced by the important theatres of war for the British but by the no longer metaphorical home front, particularly the ruinous landscape of bombed London. Both Bowen and Greene suggest that the strange moments we have never had are perhaps the ones with which we are most familiar because they have always been at the core of our subjectivity, as its central fiction or myth.
