Postwar Novels Research Articles

Fiction As Social Protest: Liyanage Amarakeerthi’s Stand Against Militarized Education

This paper looks at how fiction can be used as an effective means to protest about social issues, taking the case of what can be called the militarization of education, and the stand one writer took against it through two of his postwar novels. It will analyze how, through plot and characterization, the writer shows what harm can befall a society if what is expected in militarized education, i.e. unquestioning obedience to power and authority, bears results. The point this paper makes is that fiction is an effective tool in protests, and just like this particular writer took part in the physical rallies that many Sri Lankan academics were involved in, in 2021, in opposing what they thought was the government’s attempts to militarize the higher education system of Sri Lanka, he also put forth that resistance in his creative work, perhaps making deeper and more long-lasting inroads into the minds of the people about the harm such an education might bring to this country. In the two novels chosen here for analysis, two unconventional university students give their opinion quite ruthlessly about what is happening to the protagonists who are both involved in the media and being used for ends they themselves are unaware of. Through these plot structures, Amarakeerthi is able to explore the nexus between media, capitalism and nationalism in Sri Lanka, the awareness of which is crucial to Sri Lankans if they are to navigate the politics of post war Sri Lanka without harming themselves.

Losing Democracy: Politics and Poetics in Three of D. H. Lawrence's Postwar Novels

Losing DemocracyPolitics and Poetics in Three of D. H. Lawrence's Postwar Novels Robert L. Caserio (bio) John Winthrop's vision of a "city on a hill" has been a byword for the utopian promise of American democracy. Yet, as Charles Olson's Maximus Poems laments, Winthrop's imagination "that men / cared / for what kind of … world / they chose to/live in" was broken within a few years: "you cld carry cinders in yr hand / for what the country was worth." We might now again be carrying cinders in our hands for what the country is worth. Perhaps the breakdown is only a cyclical inevitability; perhaps it has become a permanent dysfunction. What resources do we have for facing a possible permanence? One resource—fusing a politics and poetics of the future—might be discoverable in some of D. H. Lawrence's neglected novels. They have been neglected partly because they have been politically suspect. Current erosions of political democracy, elsewhere as well as in the US, seem to be catching up with the apparently dangerous postwar, anti-democratic cast of mind that Lawrence invented for his protagonist in Kangaroo (1923), one of his two novels about Australia. "We're pot-bound inside democracy and the democratic feeling," complains the protagonist, Richard Lovat Somers. Having exiled himself from England, having escaped impressment into the armed forces, and having drifted to Australia, Somers (a virtual double for Lawrence) "could not stand" that "Demos was his own master" Down Under. The Australian Demos is strongly attracted to Marxism; but Marxism, Somers asserts, "appeal[s] only to the will-to-power in the masses, making money the whole crux … the only god." One alternative to Marxism—ugly from a pro-democracy point of view—is a fascist model of organization, to which Somers is open. He is impressed by Jack Callcott, the leader of a Populist group ("the Diggers") whom Somers considers the exemplar of "a new life-form, a new social form." That new social form turns out to be a cult of personality dedicated to the eponymous Kangaroo, whose [End Page 184] messianic political ideals are abetted by auxiliary phalanxes of thuggish Great War veterans, under Callcott's command. Somers's Populist-protofascist turn is all too dismally familiar to us in 2023. But Lawrence's novel doesn't make Somers end there. Somers parts company with Jack, and with Kangaroo; and for all his apparent hostility toward the head of the Australian Labour party, Willie Struthers, Somers "prefers" Struthers to the other leaders. Somers listens with uninterrupted attention to Struthers's eloquent speech (six pages long, and all pure Lawrence) on behalf of a global, color-blind working class. When the Diggers in Struthers's audience react violently to the speech, Somers's strongest desire is "to kill the [veteran] soldiers" who instigate the mayhem. "In truth," we are told, Somers "did love the working people." What he does not love is "All this political socialism—all politics, in fact." So Kangaroo the novel is not only pressuring the pot-bound state of democracy and democratic feeling. Somers's experience and thought pass through a gamut of political models as we know them historically—liberal, democratic, socialist, communist, fascist, anarchist. In the course of that passage, those governmental models are figured as pot-binding agents all. Somers and Lawrence are trying to think outside them. We cling to democracy, despite its increasingly superficial achievements under the pressure of the money-crux. Why not risk losing that model (and the others to boot)? It seems especially difficult—and reprehensible—to let that "democratic" model go. But, following Lawrence's lead, we can contemplate the possibility, and envision its character. We can do it with the help of what I think are Kangaroo's intrinsic companion novels, The Lost Girl (1922) and The Boy in the Bush (1924), the latter of which Lawrence cowrote with a young Australian, M. L. (Mollie) Skinner, but in which his voice predominates. The three novels equally express hostility to the established gamut of politics. But lest their assessments seem only the product of an outlier's crankiness, I first want to note a possible repository...

ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΟΙ ΦΥΛΑΚΙΣΜΕΝΟΙ ΣΤΟ „ΛΟΙΜΟ“ ΤΟΥ ΑΝΤΡΕΑ ΦΡΑΓΚΙΑ

The present paper explores the construction of the characters of prisoners used by the Greek post-war novelist Andreas Fragkias in his third novel Plague. His third novel is usually described as allegorical and presents several peculiarities in terms of characters. There are many prisoners and the scope of this paper does not allow us to examine them all. For this research we have selected four characters that appear more often than the others. The theo- retical framework we use is by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan. Frangias gives the reader the free- dom to draw his own conclusions about the behavior of the characters and their motivations throughout his work, and we believe that we have proved it in the present paper, as well. Such a narration is usually characterized by significantly more indirect presentations than direct definitions, and the four characters we have examined here undoubtedly show the latter.

The Limits of Looking: Conceptualising the Frame in Ann Quin’s Berg and Christine Brooke-Rose’s O

This article will consider the motif of the frame — conceived of as a device which isolates and presents that which falls within its bounds — in two experimental British post-war novels (Christine Brooke-Rose’s Out and Ann Quin’s Berg, both published in 1964) as a means of drawing parallels between experimental literature and conceptual art in Britain during the 1960s. I argue that Brooke-Rose and Quin develop a heightened interest in visuality in the 60s, which, in the early works examined here manifests as a thematization of vision, and in later works provokes more overt visual experiments with typography and illustration. These novelistic experiments with visual technique take place within a wider context of increasing interdisciplinarity within art forms over the course of the 60s and 70s, which a cross-investigation of visual arts and literary experimentation helps to reveal. Quin’s Berg and Brooke-Rose’s Out form a complementary pair in terms of thinking through issues of presentation and representation. Berg — with its egocentric protagonist and the window frame through which he views the outside world — calls up associations with single-point perspective, the development of this perspectival technique in the history of painting (especially the fact that the technique was historically reserved for ‘important’ figures like kings). Out’s fractured, multi-perspectival narrative, on the other hand, resonates with cubist art and contemporary developments in cinematic editing (the techniques of the French New Wave), presenting a ‘natural’ frame formed by the overlapping branches of trees, underlining the text’s interest in visual patterning and complexity. Using Phillip King’s Window Piece (1961) as my main example from the visual arts, I discuss the reconceptualization of the frame by the experimental writers and artists of the period, looking forward slightly to Jacques Derrida’s conception of the frame in The Truth in Painting (1978), which signals a loss of faith in intellectual and disciplinary mastery. Derrida’s writing ‘around’ Art — with connotations of both enclosure and obliqueness — and his purposefully perforated frame which does not seem designed to contain anything, are akin to Quin’s and Brooke-Rose’s novels, whose frame motifs — rather than containing the images they are presenting — serve to problematise the idea of strict boundaries, borders, and in a more abstract sense, of remaining within presupposed categories of definition in general. As such, the novels end up enacting a sort of theory of their own, a theory of limits with bearing on both aesthetic and social contexts within their narratives.

Stevenson, G. (2020). Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. 223 pages. (ISBN 978-3-030-47759-2)

Certain authors of the twentieth century have without a doubt fallen out of popularity in our twenty-first century, depending on which socio-critical approach one brings to their texts. Among the list, we might include Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Norman Mailer—the primary subjects in Guy Stevenson’s Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture. All five of these men have had their share of criticisms brought against them, in particular for their words involving gender discrimination, racial bias, and anti-Semitism. In any discussion concerning these authors, we cannot put these points aside, Stevenson states, and he goes to significant length to ensure that readers are cognizant of the three areas of legitimate criticism against this group. Keeping these points in mind, Stevenson unveils what he considers is a fresh approach to understanding these individuals and the counterculture movement that grew around them. The presence of Henry Miller may seem misplaced with the other post-war novelists, but Miller’s groundbreaking publications provides the basis for Stevenson’s claims of an anti-humanistic theory stretching through this group’s literature.

Retratos de mujer: extranjeras, viragos, traductoras, conferenciantes, artistas y otras modernas en las novelas breves de Margarita Nelken

Este artículo aborda la representación de la mujer moderna en las novelas La aventura de Roma (1924), El viaje a París (1924), La exótica (1930) y El orden (1931) de Margarita Nelken. El pensamiento feminista de Nelken funciona como marco de análisis crítico de esos personajes que se relacionan con la figura literaria de «la chica rara» que será común en la novela de posguerra escrita por mujeres. Estas cuatro obras breves presentan personajes femeninos atípicos que desbaratan el molde narrativo prevalente y presentan propuestas complejas de feminidad e identidad para la mujer moderna: profesionales, extranjeras, marimachos, artistas, viajeras, etc. Este estudio aborda los matices de esas representaciones antihegemónicas y subraya el esfuerzo de la autora por ofrecer retratos alternativos de la experiencia y la apariencia femenina, al tiempo que construye un modelo abierto y transgresor en el que se proponen diferentes formas de ser moderna.

Pandemic Apocalypse In Between Dystopias: Observations from Post-Apocalyptic Novels

Investigating the novels that deal with a pandemic apocalypse, this study highlights the dystopian elements preceding and following the end of the world. Inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic in the 21st century, it relates the fears of the pandemic to the literary history and political conditions nurturing that imagined end of the world in a number of post-apocalyptic novels. The novels are examined under three tropes: the early novels prophesying a 21st-century apocalypse; the postwar novels linking the plague to power conflicts; and the recent novels tackling biogenetic experimentation. The study pulls apart, with a limited depth, the parts played by the political and economic world systems in bringing about the pandemic apocalypse as well as the dystopian aftermaths. It concludes that although the novels lash a critique against capitalist recklessness, they ambivalently suspect the existence of a viable alternative.

Righting the Aftermath: On the Ethics of Recognition in the Postwar Novels of Alonso Cueto and Julien Kilanga Musinde

Abstract This article discusses the texts La Hora Azul by Alonso Cueto and Jardin Secret by Julien Kilanga Musinde within the context of postwar narratives emerging from histories of armed conflicts in Peru and Congo. The article focuses primarily on both authors' interweaving of formalistic aspects and complex narrative motifs in order to articulate an ethics of recognition that is indispensable in the reimagination of an inclusive nation in postwar contexts. Through an intertextual analysis of salient aspects such as the face-to-face encounter of self-other a la Levinas and the conceit of family–nation, the article argues that the preoccupation of the authors is less with the epic violence from which these narratives historically emerge than with the normalized forms of violence that have pitted sociopolitical relations in postcolonial nations. Thus, inclusive processes of reconciliation in the sense propounded by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru can only be possible through a self-reflexive examination of the sociopolitical habitus of the nation and the sedimented cultures/politics of exclusion that are responsible for the cracks within the imagination of the nation that make the resurgence of violent conflicts a persistent and immanent reality.

MỘT SỐ HƯỚNG NGHIÊN CỨU TIỂU THUYẾT HẬU CHIẾN Ở VIỆT NAM

MỘT SỐ HƯỚNG NGHIÊN CỨU TIỂU THUYẾT HẬU CHIẾN Ở VIỆT NAM

Fascism, comedy, and weak commitments in Nancy Mitford’s Wigs on the Green

ABSTRACTOccupying an ambiguous position in relation to the literary movements of the twentieth century, British writer Nancy Mitford (1904–1973) is most well-known for her postwar novels, The Pursuit of Love (1945) and Love in a Cold Climate (1949). However, her interwar novels published in the early years of her writing career offer the potential for fruitful readings. This article takes as its focus Mitford’s 1935 novel Wigs on the Green, a romantic comedy revolving around a fascist pageant play. Through comedy, the novel critiques the aristocracy’s engagement with radical politics, which it interprets as an effort to restore traditional ideals of Englishness. Wigs on the Green, like many of Mitford’s novels, is characterized in its form and content by weak commitments which serve to generate the novel’s laughter and critique: from the characters’ naïve acceptance of fascism to the novel’s subversion of the conventions of the romantic comedy. Wigs on the Green’s preoccupation with weak commitments is best revealed through a reading that positions Mitford as an “intermodern” writer, a framework I argue is attuned to weakness. Mitford’s novel thus reveals the usefulness of intermodernism for reading and recovering women’s comedy writing of the interwar years.

Сон в прозе Гайто Газданова как анарративная стратегия

The article discusses sleep as an anarrative author’s strategy. The special role of this motif in the writer’s metaromaniac cycle is indicated by its presence in strong positions of the text (“Evening at Claire’s”, “The Ghost of Alexander Wolf”, “Awakening”) and the generalization of the theme of sleep in works with stories about the Civil War and post-war emigration (“The Prisoner”, “Return of the Buddha”). Anarrative elements that undermine the evidence of events are described as a system of opposing the current state of affairs of eternity. In this connection, in the first novel by G. Gazdanov, an incomplete “love triangle” is analyzed – the absence of Claire’s husband as a motivated witness to the reliability of the narrative, “errors” in the sequence of events, as well as a number of strange, mysterious words and expressions. Anarrativity allows us to separate the world of becoming a narrator and the metaphysical world of the author-creator. As a result of the structural-typological analysis, a distinction is made between the concepts of “pre-incarnation” and “rebirth” in the writer's thesaurus. The first forms a narrative model of “catching” in the world of illusions, and it is connected with the outlook of the heroes who have lost their native soil and are trying to overcome de- pendence on external circumstances. Second, “rebirth” refers to the “outside” position of the author-creator, which is attributed to the penetration of anarrative elements in novels with traces of experience of participation in war. In later texts, anarrativity flows into narration, and the author’s voice does not create dissonance in the discourse of G. Gazdanov’s dominant themes: “contemplation”, “randomness of the nonrandom”, the neighborhood of “life” and “death”, each of which intersects with the idea of a dream existence. Being a universal, sleep (a state akin to hypnosis) turns out to be the ultimate form of contingency, a fatal trap of the loss of selfhood, on the one hand, on the other, as a dream, it can be a mode of creative transformation of the world. As an alternative to this opposition, there is a mode of existence beyond the extremes of the thoughtless (mainly, these are the images of officers in “Evening at Claire’s” and “The Prisoner”) or intellectually exalted (narrators in post-war novels) ways of life, demonstrated in the active manifestation of altruism and compassion of the “average Frenchman” Pierre (“Awakening”).

Voices Against Disavowal, Obscurantism, and Exclusion: The Year in Lebanon

Voices Against Disavowal, Obscurantism, and ExclusionThe Year in Lebanon Sleiman El Hajj (bio) Prologue: Dissident Voices in a Bleak Political Landscape Life writing may have been acknowledged as an independent, if interdisciplinary, field in literary criticism in the North American and Anglophone European contexts in the 1990s, but in Lebanon the 1990s marked the end of a protracted civil war (1975–1990), and the country's staggering corpus of postwar literature, in Arabic, French, and English, has been mainly geared toward fiction, rather than nonfiction. Against the backdrop of considerable social and political censorship in Lebanon, real-life accounts have been engineered into fictional prose over the past three decades. Since fiction is not assessed by the same "metrics of authenticity" (Smith and Watson) as nonfiction, fictional texts have provided a heuristic space for self-expression as well as social critique. Lebanese women authors, for example, have folded into their postwar novels "graphic glimpses into the tragic human consequences of violence," and have thus been able to "transcend confessional and political loyalties in order to concentrate almost entirely on the omitted stories of pain and suffering" (Khalaf 13). The repressive political climate that has spawned such narratives continues to date, even if life writing and its subversive voices are now becoming more audible. A number of bitterly contested social media-related arrests of activists, accused of libel against leading politicians and party leaders, were widely criticized as infringements on free speech in 2018 and 2019 (Alami; Azhari). The country was also polarized over indie rock band Mashrou' Leila, which was accused of blasphemy, sedition, homosexuality, and devil worship—not sufficiently evidenced to warrant legal action but enough to galvanize sectarian mass protests. The subsequent threats of violence from Christian right-wing groups led to the cancellation of one of the band's concerts scheduled for August 9, 2019 in Byblos, Lebanon; [End Page 121] what followed was an outcry in international media by Lebanese activists calling for secular freedom and civil rights (Hall; Kayssi). The past year saw a rise in academic as well as public interest in life writing across different modes, namely digital, audiovisual, and onstage narratives, particularly among activists and cultural practitioners interested in the life stories of people who have had traumatic experiences or suffered persecution and stigma, such as refugees, LGBT people, veiled women, atheists, sex workers, gender non-conforming individuals, and prisoners. An atmosphere of growing unrest and discontent, and the relatively long production time for biographies, autobiographies, and other personal narratives in print form, may explain why the latter were not the main vehicles for life writing in Lebanon this year. Life Stories Online: Veiled Atheists from Lebanon and Syria The debate around veiling, whether forced or voluntary, gained renewed traction in 2017 with a dispute in the classroom between a hijab-wearing sophomore student and a retiring professor at the American University of Beirut ("AUB 'Hijab'"). Soon after, Sarah Harakeh, a high school English teacher, published an incendiary personal narrative titled "I Am an Atheist and I Wear the Veil" about how her wearing of the hijab was a collective family decision, rather than an emblem of personal conviction or faith, of which she was devoid after becoming an atheist. One year later, Harakeh published the stories of ten Lebanese and Syrian atheists living in Lebanon. These women had reached out in response to her testimonial and wanted to express their own experiences of physical and mental abuse and their desires to emigrate:1 We took off the black abaya after we left the ISIS-occupied area in Syria, but then my parents made me wear the veil in Lebanon, not taking my opinions or wishes into consideration. […] My views toward religion have changed drastically. […] I wish I can go live one day in a different country, where my choices are protected, where I can be free, and take my veil off. -Samah Despite my age [29] and the fact that I hold a master's degree and I have a job, I still can't take the veil off. I still have to wake up every morning and put the veil on before going out. […] The last time I opened...

Lawrence Contra (New) Fascism

This article revisits D. H. Lawrence's political novels from a genealogical perspective that is attentive to the mimetic power of authoritarian leaders to induce affective contagion among crowds. Rather than simply condemning the authoritarian principles dramatized in post-War novels like Aaron's Rod, Kangaroo, and The Plumed Serpent as fascist, or attempting to defend D. H. Lawrence against the charge of fascism, this article situates the political novels in a Nietzschean genealogy of fascism that reveals their theoretical potential to fight contra (new) fascism in the twenty-first century. In particular, this genealogy revisits Lawrence's fin-de-siècle concerns with crowd psychology, hypnotic dispossession, and affective contagion in light of the growing realization of the affective and infective efficacy of contemporary leaders who rely on a mimetic, all too mimetic rhetoric—disseminated by new media—to trigger fascist contagion. Thus reframed, my wager is that Lawrence's political novels might help us diagnose why (new) fascist leaders have the disquieting (will to) power to make humans desire what Michel Foucault calls "the very thing that dominates and exploits us."

김성한의 전후소설과 폭발(暴發)의 윤리

김성한의 소설은 기존 연구에서 패배적 허무주의에 빠질 수밖에 없었던 전후의 실존주의를 대표한다고 평가받았다. 그러나 김성한은 무조건적인 비판이 아닌 책임 있는 대결 의식을 보여주고 있기에, 1950년대 작가 중에서도 강한 긍정의 세계를 추구한 작가라고 할 수 있다. 김성한의 전후소설에서는 과거의 꿈들이 부서져 있는 잔해 속에서도 역사를 새롭게 구축하려는 자세(2장), 과거의 잔해들을 수집한 후 새로운 맥락에서 인용함으로써 현재를 구조적으로 재구성하려는 자세(3장), 최악의 상황을 비유하는 소실점에서부터 희망적 미래를 다시 추구하려는 자세(4장) 등을 보이고 있기 때문이다. 이런 맥락에서 김성한을 엘리트주의자나 허무주의자, 관념론자라고 비판하는 기존의 평가는 재고될 수 있다. 1950년대라는 전후 상황은 어중간한 중립 자체가 불가능한 ‘극한의 시대’였기 때문이다. 이때의 극한은 양 극단이 첨예하게 대립하고 있는 긴장 상태를 지칭하기도 하지만, 이와 동시에 그런 대립이 극에 다다름으로써 다른 국면으로 전환될 가능성 또한 최고조에 이른 상태를 의미한다. 이런 ‘극한의 시대’를 배경으로 하는 김성한의 전후소설은 갈등을 봉합하거나 용해시키지 않고, 그런 현실에 대해 적극적으로 반응하는 ‘폭발의 윤리’를 보여준다. 긍정과 부정이 격렬하게 부딪히는 데서 발생하는 폭발 중심의 소설 이 작가가 중시했던 문학적 윤리임을 실천적이고도 구체적으로 증명해주고 있기 때문이다.

From Technician’s Extravaganza to Logical Fantasy:

Abstract This article argues that John Wyndham’s postwar novels represent a sustained attempt to analyze and problematize the relationship between knowledge, expertise, and society. Wyndham held vi...

Something Extraordinary Keeps Happening: J. G. Ballard's Enclave World

AbstractThis essay considers a late novel sequence by the British speculative fiction writer J. G. Ballard (1930–2009). Although Ballard is often celebrated as a great iconoclast, there is arguably no postwar novelist with a more recognizable style. The essay analyzes Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003), and Kingdom Come (2006) as a programmatic fictional project. It identifies five key formal and thematic elements of the late sequence, paying particular attention to the question of setting. In Ballard's late fictions, the gated enclave figures as a privileged spatial agent within the diegesis; the central quality of these enclaves is that they are at once ordinary and extraordinary—set off from any shared social fabric and representative of general psychic and material qualities. Methodologically, the essay begins with critical description, following the grain of Ballard's late novels to show how their plots, themes, and characters relate to their settings. The essay then explores Ballard's autocritical explanation of his mature fiction as a belated response to his childhood in the extraterritorial International Settlement of Shanghai, drawing on his autobiographies as well as new research in his personal manuscripts, now collected at the British Library. Any full exploration of the late novels' autocritical energies must go beyond the project of critical description, which by itself produces a historically flat and argumentatively recursive account of Ballard's extraordinary literary accomplishment.

박경리 전후 장편소설의 ‘사랑서사’ 연구 : 인지구성과 몸의 은유를 중심으로

박경리 전후 장편소설의 ‘사랑서사’ 연구 : 인지구성과 몸의 은유를 중심으로

“Representations of the Intellectual” in Post-War British Novels: Hemlock and After and The History Man

“Representations of the Intellectual” in Post-War British Novels: Hemlock and After and The History Man

Testimony of War: Australian Memoirs and Fiction of the Pacific War

ABSTRACTPacific War writings, especially memoirs by those who were involved as soldiers or prisoners of war, occupy a significant place in Australian literature. They have contributed to the creation of national stories and myths, constructing a collective memory of war for Australians.In recent years, coinciding with the 70th anniversary of the end of the war in the Pacific, several novels dealing with the war were published in quick succession. These novels not only look at the theatre of war, but also at Japanese internment camps, the vivisection laboratory in Tokyo and sometimes war through the enemy’s eyes. Authors from the post-war generation provide different perspectives and reflections of the Pacific War.This article examines examples of first-person memoirs of the post-war years and recent novels to consider the different contributions they make to constructing meaning around war writings. Considered together, these are polyphonic voices of war as an ‘ongoing’ event.

Negation of Survival in the Post-war Urban Revival: Septimus in “Mrs Dalloway” and Édouard in “The Great Swindle”

This paper focuses on Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Pierre Lemaitre’s The Great Swindle (2013), with the aim of pointing out that these two novels share strikingly similar presentations of post-First World War urban social conditions. We first emphasise that in both novels there is visible post-war progress (in London and Paris, respectively), marked by obvious enthusiasm, which is, however, weakened by war consequences. In addition, we detect the presence of the sandwich board job in each novel as indicative of post-war emotional ambiguity. We then claim that the post-war social revival, as the characters of Septimus in Mrs Dalloway and Edouard in The Great Swindle suggest, is constantly being slowed down by some war survivors who, due to harsh war experiences, cannot reintegrate into society, but instead negate their own lives. Thus, as we further stress, they seem to embrace death much before they actually die. Assisted by Elizabeth Grosz’s theory of interface, we derive conclusions about the characters’ communication with the city. Lastly, we offer examples of Septimus’s and Edouard’s obsession with and anticipation of personal deaths, and of a hidden interpretation of their post-war deaths as war dying. Our final goal is to answer whether the two representatives of war survival renunciation, despite living through the war, can be said to die metaphorically in it. In addition, we recognise and (re)define a collective understanding of the war in relation to post-war novels.