Novels & Novelists in Post-Modern Literature
Post-War Novel After Hitler's devastation of Britain, the country was literally in ruins, torn apart by years of bombardment. The landscape of ruins must also be recognized as forming an integral part of much of the literature of the late 1940s and the early 1950s. It was a landscape that provided a metaphor for broken lives and spirits. Rose Macaulay and the Expression of Ruin One of the best expressions in fiction of this ruin and its implications is a novel, The World My Wilderness (1950), by Rose Macaulay (1881-1958). The novel's London is not only post-War but also post-Eliotic: "Here you belong; you cannot get away, you do not wish to get away, for this is the maquis that lies about the margins of the wrecked world, and here your feet are set... 'Where are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, you cannot say, or guess....' But you can say, you can guess, that it is you yourself, your own roots, that clutch the stony rub…