British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: For the Duration by Beryl Pong

Abstract

Reviewed by: British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: For the Duration by Beryl Pong Emily Ridge British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: For the Duration. Beryl Pong. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 320. $85.00 (cloth). Beryl Pong's new monograph, British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: For the Duration, makes an original contribution to the growing field of mid-twentieth-century literary studies, a period too often overlooked in favor of the more swaggering figures of modernism and postmodernism. The invigoration of scholarly interest in the literature of this era was initiated just over a decade ago with the publication of two key essay volumes: British Fiction After Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century, edited by Marina MacKay and Lyndsey Stonebridge (Palgrave, 2007), and Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain, edited by Kristen Bluemel (Edinburgh University Press, 2009). Its establishment as a field of study in its own right has been consolidated more recently with the launch, by Oxford University Press, of a "Mid-Century Studies" series, overseen by Stonebridge, Allan Hepburn and Adam Piette, of which Pong's book forms a part. British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime is an appropriate addition to a series that focuses on a period typically defined, through prefixes like "inter" and "mid," by its liminal, in-between status. Pong's emphasis is on the conception of "wartime" and, in particular, on the feeling of anxious and dread-inducing suspension between the past and futurity that was peculiar to the Second World Wartime imaginary: what she calls, after Martin Hägglund and Pamela Lee, late modernist "chronophobia" (14). As she notes in the first chapter, "dread [End Page 808] changes from being something with an expected duration to one whose condition of suspension, whose 'mid-term-ness' or 'middleness,' has itself become a terminus" (35–36). Although she is specifically referring, in this instance, to wartime life writing, it is an observation that provides an index to the concerns of the book as a whole. What we learn from this mid-century study above all, is that the Second World War marks a point when chronophobic "middleness" becomes an enduring condition, in line with the transformation of war itself from an "event" to something more "open-ended and everyday" (4). "Wartime," as such, seeps through the permeable temporal borders that are allocated to it in history volumes. Pong's book adheres to this idea in that it traces the contours of "wartime" well beyond 1945. Yet the temporal framework of the book itself is sharply defined; Pong only occasionally strays outside of the 1940s in terms of the key texts that she considers. Within this decade, her knowledge and interests are expansive and wide-ranging. She surveys a number of different literary forms (novel, poetry, short story) and genres (life writing, the late modernist Bildungsroman, children's literature, among others), and shows an extraordinary sensitivity to how these forms and genres are tuned to respond to the exigencies of the moment. The book offers astute commentary on the chronophobic qualities of the works of many writers, though Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, and Graham Greene are notable and recurring figures throughout; these are writers whose wartime works seem to epitomize, in distinctive ways, the aesthetic of "dreading forward" that Pong sets out to document (15). Borrowed from Green, this resonant phrase is employed, at various points in the book, to describe a mode of "reading forward but understanding backward" (73). Her field of vision extends well beyond the domains of literary writing and criticism. The book's cultural reference points are impressively diverse, featuring art (both state-sponsored or otherwise), photography, and film (narrative and documentary). It equally delves into adjacent disciplines like psychology (most prominently, trauma studies), cartography, ecology, archaeology, architecture, and, most significantly, philosophies of time. Pong's capacity to move deftly between so many authors, artists, genres, and disciplines, while retaining a depth of engagement at every stage, is one of the most remarkable aspects of this project. The book is divided into three parts. Part one addresses the topic of "Blitz-Time Capsules" and begins with the Cupaloy time...