University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2016 States of Repair: Institutions of Private Life in the Postwar Anglophone Novel Kelly Mee Rich University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Recommended Citation Rich, Kelly Mee, "States of Repair: Institutions of Private Life in the Postwar Anglophone Novel" (2016). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1969. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1969 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1969 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. States of Repair: Institutions of Private Life in the Postwar Anglophone Novel Abstract This project proposes that one of the most enduring cultural legacies of the Second World War was the welfare state’s fantasy of rebuilding Britain. Beginning with the 1942 Beveridge Report’s promise to care for citizens “from the cradle to the grave,” the welfare state envisioned that managing individuals’ private lives would result in a more coherent and equitable community. Literature records this historic transition in order to narrate its transformative social potential, as well as its darker failures. Midcentury writers Elizabeth Bowen, George Orwell, and Muriel Spark used the militarized Home Front to present postwar Britain as a zone of lost privacy and new collective logics. As the century progressed, influential novelists such as Alan Hollinghurst, Michael Ondaatje, and Kazuo Ishiguro all looked backwards to 1945, registering an unfulfilled nostalgia for a Britain that never was, as well as the need to come to terms with welfare’s decaying remains. Their works index welfare’s limitations, situating Britain’s domestic policies within longer trajectories of colonial, racist, and homophobic violence.