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• W4380608718 abstract "Reviewed by: Reconstruction Fiction: Housing and Realist Literature in Postwar Britain by Paula Derdiger Ryan Karpovage Paula Derdiger. Reconstruction Fiction: Housing and Realist Literature in Postwar Britain. Ohio State UP, 2020. 219p. To see clearly requires unobstructed views: a great expanse before one’s eyes, to reach out toward an ideal and in hope with the construction of each new day, to make an idealized future a reality. Following the interiority and isolation that citizens of Great Britain experienced through World War II came a distinguished call for social mobility, transparency, and outward optimism. However, before such endeavors were to become succinct and fulfilled, reevaluation and reconstruction of structural values, both architectural and aesthetic, were in dire need. Throughout dilapidated and war-ridden London stood those who [End Page 103] desired to reconstruct these values not with the intention of returning to what was, but to stand in transparency and new un-idealized reality— to stand humbly empowered by Elizabeth Bowen’s declaration in “Calico Windows”: “we shall look outward through glass” (186). Paula Derdiger’s Reconstruction Fiction: Housing and Realist Literature in Postwar Britain is an inquiry and assessment of the Welfare State and its impact on postwar literary fiction through emerging voices of a generation comparatively more neglected than that of their predecessors T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. In the wake of Woolf ’s iconic interiority, Derdiger evaluates the realist tradition not as a historical anachronism of the 19th century, but as an ongoing development of ideas. In the same vein, realist literature exists fluidly beyond the constraints of historical dating. In fact, as Derdiger argues, recent critics state that realism is “naïvely mimetic, and that 20th century realism is residual” (25). A gap exists in modern fiction in which realism becomes the mode of interpretation and representation to fill that gap (41). She moves her inquiry away from the debate about “the end of modernism” and toward a broader historical analysis of realist techniques following World War II, thus developing a formal framework of “reconstruction fiction” that is intended to exist alongside and within categories of modernism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. Derdiger identifies four primary stylistic approaches of “reconstruction fiction” that serve as key analytical pieces of her argument: an interest in the visible, exterior world; an account of what is invisible, unseen, or missing; a demand for historical continuity; and a thematic, formal, and stylistic engagement with the present (12-13). The framework of this renewed way of thinking about mid-century and postwar literature emphasizes the indisputable influence of the war and the creation of the Welfare State. Just as limited as the realm and parameters of realism, “reconstruction fiction” broadens the term and allows for more diverse representation through new welfare-based lenses. As both a critical term and set of texts, “reconstruction fiction” is dedicated to the realist representation of social and material conditions and change by responding to the altered landscapes and sociopolitical attitudes toward housing through a creative attention to the exterior (6). Works of Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Patrick Hamilton, Doris Lessing, Colin MacInnes, Sam Selvon, and Elizabeth [End Page 104] Taylor showcase the emergence of the exterior, and of whose characters attempt to break from an “individual” focus and shift outward toward a “collective” one, as a generative response to the war and Welfare State conditions. The disparaging acts of the British government and the failure of the Welfare State to provide stable housing in the years following the war allude to the moral and political abandonment of its citizens. It becomes evident that Derdiger’s deliberate selection of non-central writers of realist and postwar literature portrays the groups most heavily impacted by the government’s failure and affirms Bowen’s urgency in accepting “this ‘bleak’ emptiness as a new condition for a mode of fiction… that is liberated from nostalgia” (152). In acceptance of the realities, works of “reconstruction fiction” serve as emergency signals for progress, change, and shifts on both cultural and societal levels. Critics of 20th century British literature and cultural history, as well as those interested in realist fiction and the built environment, will find that Derdiger’s original disposition is an empowering..." @default.
• W4380608718 created "2023-06-15" @default.
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• W4380608718 date "2021-03-01" @default.
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• W4380608718 title "Reconstruction Fiction: Housing and Realist Literature in Postwar Britain by Paula Derdiger (review)" @default.
• W4380608718 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/rmr.2021.0008" @default.
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