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I am doing my research on British identity in the second half of 20th century (after WW2) and I need your help. Could you suggest me novels, short stories, poems which deal with this topic? I could really use some help because I don't want to miss anything.
Post 2nd World War reading & the British perspective on this. Try the works of the following writers:
1. Grahame Greene.
2. Evelyn Waugh.
3. John le Carre.
3. Kingsley Amis.
but how about John Fowles, Auberon Waugh, or the elder Kingsley.
To get a balanced view, Alan Sillitoe
author of Look Back in Anger, John Osborne. The film of this was the first time I saw Richard Burton on screen.
If you want working class Barnsley - then there is A Kestrel For A Knave by Barry Hines, which became the film Kes. Another one is Untold Stories by Alan Bennett set in Leeds which gives a lower middle class perspective of the 50's onwards. Very funny it is too
For post industrial multi-ethnic Britain, written right at the end of the 20th century, try White teeth by Zadie Smith.
"Youth" by J.M. Coetzee is really wonderful on Britishness. It's about his time in London, fresh off the boat from South Africa, in the early 1960s, and is full of astute observations on British identity from the perspective of a new immigrant who (like his heroes Eliot & Pound) has already been steeped in British culture before entering the country and meeting it "raw".
David Lodge's novels ("Nice Work", "Small World", ...) have interesting (and humorous!) things to say about British academic (& business) culture in the post-war period.
William Golding - Lord of the Flies - British kids at their best...
Philip Larkin is a very British poet, and has much to say about British identity, including parental influence :)
Are you including film and TV? If possible, you should. For example:
Educating Rita - great on working class aspiration & strange British educational institutions.
Boys from the Blackstuff - great on Thatcherism and its effect on the working class work force.
thank you very much for your help!
If you're looking for things not really discussing Engish identity directly, but moving in that area, Roald Dahl I find interesting towards Englishness too. Matilda with her fatehr who deals in second hand cars and cheats his customers, her mother who goes to bingo everyday, her brother who eats sandwiches with peanut butter and strawberry jam... Sounds very Eastenders to me...
Charly and the Chocolate Factory with its children who all want the factory of Willy Wonka... Mike Teevee and the girl... Sad really, with her parents...