'Poignant and inspiring' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'The World My Wilderness . . . had a powerful effect on me as a young reader' HERMIONE LEE, GUARDIAN 'An elegiac, evocative depiction of the aftermath of the Second World War' PARIS REVIEW It is 1946 and the people of France and England are facing the aftermath of the War. Sent by her beautiful, indolent mother to England, Barbary Deniston is thrown into the care of her distinguished father and conventional stepmother. Barbary has spent her childhood years in the sunshine of Provence. During the War, she ran wild with the Maquis, experiencing collaboration, betrayal and resistance. In peacetime the young woman has been taken away from all she knows and placed into the drab austerity of post-war London life. Confused and unhappy, she discovers the flowering bomb craters around St Paul's Cathedral. Here, in the bombed heart of London, with the outcasts living on the edge of society, she finds an echo of the wilderness of Provence and is forced to confront the wilderness within herself.

Barbary, a member of the French maquis during the war, is sent to her father in London to complete her education.

Near the end of the Second World War, new ideas about citizenship, national identity, belonging, and rights emerged as the atrocities of the war – coupled with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – spurred writers and citizens around the world to think about their responsibilities to their fellow man. Covering British authors and contemporary fiction by migrant writers publishing at mid-century, as well as some photography from the era, Around 1945 is a collection of essays that reveals how literary texts and cultural events modeled human rights issues such as dignity, freedom, sovereignty, and responsibility. Unified by an investigation of the human and cultural aspects of universal rights, these essays show that British writers tested the parameters of citizenship and rights in novelistic form. By imagining duties and rights of citizens in hypothetical contexts, these novels expanded on the legislated entitlements and obligations that make up civic and human identity. To this day the repercussions of 1945 continue to unfold in stories about statehood, refugees, humanitarianism, displacement, and national belonging. At the same time, novels continue to imagine the human person, equal in rights and dignity before the law, yet often compromised by the political exigencies of nation-states that do not recognize legal, political, or human rights. Tracing the rippling consequences of the Second World War from 1945 through the Cold War and into the present, Around 1945 is an extraordinarily rich volume that will alter our perception of pre- and post-war British literature. Contributors include Nadine Attewell (McMaster), Mitchell C. Brown (Dalhousie), Matthew Hart (Columbia), Janice Ho (Colorado), Emily Hyde (Rowan), Peter Kalliney (Kentucky), Marina MacKay (Oxford), Melanie Micir (Washington, St. Louis), Adam Piette (Sheffield) Claire Seiler (Dickinson College), and Ian Whittington (Mississippi).

Landscape has been central to definitions of Englishness for centuries. David Matless argues that landscape has been the site where English visions of the past, present and future have met in debates over questions of national identity, disputes over history and modernity, and ideals of citizenship and the body. Landscape and Englishness is extensively illustrated and draws on a wide range of material - topographical guides, health manuals, paintings, poetry, architectural polemic, photography, nature guides and novels. The author first examines the inter-war period, showing how a vision of Englishness and landscape as both modern and traditional, urban and rural, progressive and preservationist, took shape around debates over building in the countryside, the replanning of cities, and the cultures of leisure and citizenship. He concludes by tracing out the story of landscape and Englishness down to the present day, showing how the familiar terms of debate regarding landscape and heritage are a product of the immediate post-war era, and asking how current arguments over care for the environment or expressions of the nation resonate with earlier histories and geographies. " ... cultural history at its best, subtle, multi-layered and full of new ideas and insights ... this book is a 'must'."—Contemporary British History " ... creates a convincing portrait of the changing meanings of the English landscape in the twentieth century."—Times Literary Supplement

C. S. Lewis is one of the best-loved and most engaging Christian writers of recent times, and he continues to be a powerful defender of the faith. It is in his imaginative fiction that his genius finds its fullest expression and makes its most lasting theological contribution. Famously, Lewis had friends who, like him, employed powerfully creative imaginations to explore the profundities of Christian thought and their struggles with their faith. These illuminating essays on C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Dorothy L. Sayers, Rose Macaulay, and Austin Farrer are written by an international team of Lewis scholars.

Concentrating on female modernists specifically, this volume examines spiritual issues and their connections to gender during the modernist period. Scholarly inquiry surrounding women writers and their relation to what Wassily Kandinsky famously hoped would be an ‘Epoch of the Great Spiritual’ has generated myriad contexts for closer analysis including: feminist theology, literary and religious history, psychoanalysis, queer and trauma theory. This book considers canonical authors such as Virginia Woolf while also attending to critically overlooked or poorly understood figures such as H.D., Mary Butts, Rose Macaulay, Evelyn Underhill, Christopher St. John and Dion Fortune. With wide-ranging topics such as the formally innovative poetry of Stevie Smith and Hope Mirrlees to Evelyn Underhill’s mystical treatises and correspondence, this collection of essays aims to grant voices to the mostly forgotten female voices of the modernist period, showing how spirituality played a vital role in their lives and writing.

Paradise Pursued reinterprets the fiction of one of England's most important mid-century novelists. Knowledgeably yet accessibly written, it demonstrates the recurring obsession with paradisal pursuit that runs through all twenty-three of Rose Macaulay's richly varied fictions.