Fiction and Trauma from the Second World War to 9/11

This chapter looks at how contemporary British and Irish novelists reflect on the spasms of catastrophic violence that have punctuated the twentieth century and continue to define the twenty-first. These events not only traumatized individuals on a mass scale, but also dealt irrevocable damage to foundational assumptions concerning reason, progress, meaning, and language. Such weighty preoccupations, however, took some time to fully coalesce in the fiction of the post-Second World War period. There were few substantial treatments of the war in its immediate aftermath. When such responses began to appear in the 1950s, and swelled in number in the 1960s, they did so predominantly in the form of conventional social realist narratives concerned with the immediate experience of combat and the impact of the conflict on the structures of British and Irish society.