• ‘A Rather Ungoverned Bringing Up’: Postwar Resistance and Displacement in The World My Wilderness

    Author(s):
    Ian Whittington (see profile)
    Date:
    2016
    Subject(s):
    British literature, Literature, Modern
    Item Type:
    Book chapter
    Tag(s):
    bildungsroman, blitz literature, children in literature, Postwar fiction, rose macaulay, Modern literature, Trauma, War literature
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6HR4W
    Abstract:
    Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness (1950) rewrites post-Second World War crises of displacement, child combat, and state re-integration through the genre of the domestic melodrama. Adolescent protagonists Barbary and Raoul move from France to London at the end of the war as both combatants and refugees, having spent the conflict aiding the Resistance. Written between the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1947) and the Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959), the novel stages children’s wartime and postwar vulnerability as the product of an uncertain relation to the state: deprived political representation and disillusioned by their mother’s romance with a collaborator in Vichy France, the children cannot assimilate themselves to the emerging welfare state in Britain. Against this backdrop of familial estrangement, in which political dissimulation is second nature, the novel argues for the insufficiency of the interventionist state as a resolution of the traumas suffered by children in wartime.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Book chapter     Show details
    Publisher:
    McGill-Queen\'s UP
    Pub. Date:
    2016
    Book Title:
    Around 1945: Literature, Citizenship, Rights
    Author/Editor:
    Allan Hepburn
    Page Range:
    48 - 65
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    6 years ago
    License:
    Attribution
    Share this:

    Downloads

    Item Name: pdf whittington-macaulay.pdf
      Download View in browser
    Activity: Downloads: 256

    Back to Deposits