ABSTRACT
English-language literary history long constructed the late 1940s as a period of artistic abeyance in the face of the staggering aftermath of World War II and in comparison to the literary experiment and innovation that characterized the earlier “postwar” period of the 1920s. This chapter argues that institutionalized practices of periodizing twentieth-century literature helped both to create and to compound the wan reputation of the century’s literary middle. Accordingly, the chapter brackets the periodizing structures—e.g., the “1945 break”—and the priorities of established literary periods—e.g., modernism, postwar—that overlap at, but do not necessarily illuminate, late-1940s literature. To recover some of the lost texture of literary late 1940s, this chapter centers instead on looser chrono-historical units and narratives—e.g., “midcentury,” “the recent war,” “the age of anxiety”—that, internally to late 1940s and especially in the literature of those years, attained complex salience as period self-concepts. The chapter concludes by adumbrating the powerful critique that emerges from late-1940s US literature of the swift remaking of WWII, then “the recent war,” into the “good” one. Especially in the United States, the narrative of “the good war” continues to misinform military policy and law, contort public culture, and preclude historical self-awareness.
