Contemporary English Literature (1945-Present)

On 8 May 1945, crowds filled the streets of London to celebrate the end of the war in Europe. Winston Churchill, who had led Britain through nearly six years of fighting, was cheered like a hero. Less than three months later, the voters removed him from office in the general election of July 1945. They did not stop admiring him. They simply wanted a different country from the one he stood for.

That wish for change shaped almost everything written afterwards. The Britain that came out of the war was tired, short of food and money, and full of bombed streets. Yet it was about to build a national health service, give up its empire and welcome people from distant lands. Each of these changes sent new questions into novels, poems and plays.

The age that began in 1945 is called the Contemporary age, and it has no fixed end. Its first writers had lived through the war and wrote about a smaller, poorer and more doubtful Britain. Its later writers came from Nigeria, India, the Caribbean, Ireland and Scotland, and wrote in an English that no longer belonged to England alone. Its history is the history of one island's literature growing into a world literature.

The world of this age

Political life

The Labour government that took office in July 1945, led by Clement Attlee, arrived with a clear plan. During the war, the economist William Beveridge had written a famous report naming five great evils: want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. Voters expected the next government to act on it. In July 1948, Attlee's government launched the National Health Service, which gave medical care to everyone whatever their income. This was the heart of what people called the welfare state.

Abroad, the problem was harder. Britain had ruled India for generations, but the war had left it short of money and weary of governing by force, while Indian demands for freedom had grown too strong to refuse. On 15 August 1947, India and Pakistan became independent. Ghana followed in 1957 and Nigeria in 1960.

One event in 1956 showed how far British power had fallen. Egypt's leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, took control of the Suez Canal, which Britain had long treated as its road to the East. Britain, France and Israel sent forces to take it back, but strong pressure, above all from the United States, forced them to withdraw. Many British people learned that their country could no longer act as a great power on its own.

In May 1979, the Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher became prime minister. Her government believed that the state had grown too large. It sold public industries, reduced the power of trade unions and defeated a long miners' strike in 1984-85. Her policies brought new wealth to some parts of the country and long unemployment to others, above all in the coalfields and the north. That divide became a major subject of the novels and plays of the 1980s.

Meanwhile, a violent conflict known as the Troubles divided Northern Ireland from the late 1960s. It began when Catholic protesters demanded equal rights and met police and Protestant opposition. On 30 January 1972, British soldiers shot dead thirteen people at a march in Derry, and a fourteenth later died. The day is remembered as Bloody Sunday. The conflict moved towards its end with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

In a referendum on 23 June 2016, a narrow majority voted to leave the European Union, and Britain formally left on 31 January 2020.

Social life

Daily life in the late 1940s was hard. Food was still rationed, many cities lay in ruins from bombing, and some rationing lasted until 1954.

Britain also needed workers to rebuild. On 22 June 1948, the ship Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, near London, with 1,027 passengers, of whom more than 800 had come from the Caribbean. They were citizens of the British Empire, some had served in Britain's forces, and many believed they were coming to the mother country. They found poor housing and open prejudice. Their arrival began the migration of the Windrush generation, and people from India and Pakistan also settled in British towns in the years that followed.

A different change was happening in classrooms. The Education Act of 1944, steered through Parliament by R. A. Butler, made secondary schooling free for all, and the school-leaving age rose to fifteen in 1947. Clever children from poor homes could now win places at grammar schools and universities. They grew up educated and ambitious, and they discovered how little the old class system had changed. Their anger would soon appear in books and plays.

By the 1960s, the rules that had governed private life for generations were loosening. A famous test came in 1960, when Penguin Books published the full text of D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, which had only appeared in shortened forms in Britain, and was put on trial for obscenity. The jury cleared Penguin on 2 November 1960, and many people saw the verdict as a turning point towards a more open society. Parliament then changed the law quickly. In 1967, it made abortion legal under conditions and ended the legal ban on private homosexual acts between men over twenty-one in England and Wales. In 1968, it ended the censorship of the stage. Laws such as the Equal Pay Act of 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 answered the demands of women's groups.

Economic life

Britain had won the war but nearly gone bankrupt doing it. It owed huge sums abroad, many factories were old, and the government controlled money and goods strictly. American help, including the Marshall Plan from 1948, eased the burden, and the government took the coal mines into public ownership in 1947 and the railways in 1948. By the 1950s, jobs were plentiful and wages were rising. In 1957, the prime minister Harold Macmillan told a crowd that most British people had never had it so good.

The good times did not last. In the 1970s, oil prices rose sharply and strikes spread, and the strikes of the winter of 1978-79 helped to bring Thatcher to power. Under her, mines, steelworks and shipyards closed, while the financial district of London boomed after the rules of the stock market were changed in 1986. The south grew richer and much of the north grew poorer.

Religion

At the start of the age, the Church of England stood at the centre of national life, and the Education Act of 1944 required every school day to begin with an act of collective worship. In the following decades, fewer people attended church, and doubt became a common subject in writing. In 1954, Philip Larkin wrote Church Going, a poem about a visitor to an empty church who does not believe, yet feels that the place still matters. Religious questions did not disappear. Catholic writers such as Graham Greene and Muriel Spark wrote about sin and grace, and migration brought Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism into British towns.

Literature in this age

The language

For centuries, most books in English had been written in a polished standard form, the English of schools, newspapers and the radio. The writers of the new age wanted other voices on the page. Alan Sillitoe, who grew up in a working-class family in Nottingham, wrote about factory workers in their own kind of speech. Anthony Burgess invented a teenage slang called Nadsat for A Clockwork Orange (1962), mixing English with words borrowed from Russian.

Outside Britain, the change went deeper. In 1965, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe argued that English could carry the experience of Africa if it was bent into a new shape, and his novel Things Fall Apart (1958) is full of Igbo proverbs. The Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o made the opposite choice. In Decolonising the Mind (1986), he explained that he would write in Gikuyu, because the language of the rulers had kept African minds tied to them. In India, Salman Rushdie mixed Hindi and Urdu words into English sentences, and in 1994 James Kelman won the Booker Prize with a novel told in the speech of a Glasgow worker.

How the writing reached its readers

The number of readers had grown. The Education Act of 1944 had produced a generation taught to read widely, and the publisher Penguin, founded by Allen Lane in 1935, had already shown that serious books could be sold as cheap paperbacks. When Lady Chatterley's Lover went on sale in 1960, it cost only three shillings and sixpence. The Arts Council of Great Britain, set up in 1946, gave public money to theatres and writers, so that new plays could be staged even when they made no profit.

Prizes then brought books to wider notice. The Booker Prize was first awarded in 1969, and a win could change a writer's life, because shops sold thousands of extra copies. From 2014, it was opened to any novel written in English and published in Britain or Ireland.

Poetry

In the 1940s, the best-known English poetry was rich, rhetorical and full of strong feeling, and Dylan Thomas was its most famous voice. Many younger poets, who had grown up during the war, found this style cloudy and showy. They wanted verse that said plainly what it meant. In October 1954, the magazine The Spectator gave a name to this mood and called it the Movement.

Two years later, the poet Robert Conquest collected nine of these writers in an anthology called New Lines (1956). They included Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn, D. J. Enright, John Holloway and Conquest himself. Their poems used everyday subjects, clear argument and regular form.

Larkin became the best loved of them. He worked as a university librarian, and his poems turned ordinary scenes into quiet thoughts about time and death. Church Going (1954), about a man who visits an empty church although he no longer believes, appeared in The Less Deceived (1955). Two more books followed, The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974).

By the late 1950s, some readers felt that the polite tone of the Movement left out too much. Ted Hughes answered with The Hawk in the Rain (1957), a book of animals, violence and the raw force of nature. His wife, the American poet Sylvia Plath, wrote about her own pain and family in a style called confessional poetry, which the American poet Robert Lowell had made famous with Life Studies (1959). Plath died in February 1963, and her collection Ariel appeared in 1965. In 1962, the critic A. Alvarez had gathered newer poets in an anthology, The New Poetry, to show that English verse could be wider and darker.

Irish poetry found its own voice. Seamus Heaney, a farmer's son from County Derry, published Death of a Naturalist in 1966, a book about country childhood. When the Troubles began, his poems turned towards violence. North (1975) uses ancient bodies found preserved in peat bogs to think about the killings around him. He won the Nobel Prize in 1995.

In 2009, Carol Ann Duffy became the first woman, and the first Scot, to be Poet Laureate, the country's official poet. Her book The World's Wife (1999) gives voices to the wives and partners of famous men from myth and history. Simon Armitage followed her in 2019.

Drama

In the early 1950s, the London stage was mostly comfortable and polite. The big theatres showed plays about the middle and upper classes, and every script first went to the office of the Lord Chamberlain, a royal official who could ban a play or order changes.

The first shock came from Paris. Samuel Beckett, an Irishman living in France, wrote Waiting for Godot in French, and it opened at the Théâtre de Babylone on 5 January 1953. Two tramps wait beside a road for a man named Godot, who never comes. The English version reached the Arts Theatre in London in 1955. In 1961, the critic Martin Esslin named this new kind of drama the Theatre of the Absurd, because its plays showed a world with no clear purpose. Beckett won the Nobel Prize in 1969.

The second shock came from London itself. A new company, the English Stage Company, had taken over the Royal Court Theatre under the director George Devine, and it asked for plays by new writers. John Osborne, a young actor, sent in Look Back in Anger. It opened on 8 May 1956 as the company's third production. Its hero, Jimmy Porter, is a clever young man from a working-class home who runs a sweet stall in spite of his university education. He pours his anger on his middle-class wife and on a country that offers him no place. Journalists soon called writers like Osborne the Angry Young Men.

New writers followed. Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey (1958) was staged by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop. Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party (1958), in which two strangers arrive to question a quiet lodger, was badly received at first. Its silences, pauses and hidden threats were later called the comedy of menace, and Pinter won the Nobel Prize in 2005.

The censors were slowly losing the argument. Through the 1960s, the Royal Court fought the Lord Chamberlain, and a prosecution over Edward Bond's Saved succeeded in 1966. Public anger grew, and in 1968 Parliament passed the Theatres Act, which ended the Lord Chamberlain's power over the stage.

Playwrights were now free to be bolder. Tom Stoppard, born in Czechoslovakia and raised in England, wrote plays that were clever and funny. His Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead takes two minor characters from Hamlet and lets them wonder what is happening to them. It was staged at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1966 and at the National Theatre in 1967. Caryl Churchill's Top Girls (1982) put women's lives at the centre. In 1995, Sarah Kane's Blasted shocked audiences at the Royal Court with its violence, and plays of this kind were called in-yer-face theatre.

Prose

The war left a mood of fear, and the first great novels of the age gave it a shape. George Orwell published Animal Farm in August 1945. It is a fable in which farm animals drive out their master and are then ruled by cruel pigs, and it was Orwell's warning about the Russian revolution. In 1949, as the Cold War began, he published Nineteen Eighty-Four, which imagines a state that watches everything its people do and rewrites the truth. William Golding, a schoolteacher, published Lord of the Flies in 1954. It follows schoolboys stranded on an island who slowly turn savage, and Golding won the Nobel Prize in 1983.

At the same time, a group of novels spoke for the young people whom the Education Act of 1944 had educated. Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954) mocks the stuffy life of a university. John Braine's Room at the Top (1957) follows a poor young man who climbs into wealth. Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) follows a factory worker in Nottingham.

Women writers took the novel in other directions. Doris Lessing, who grew up in Southern Rhodesia and moved to England in 1949, wrote The Grass Is Singing (1950). Her The Golden Notebook (1962) tells the life of a woman writer through four notebooks, and she won the Nobel Prize in 2007. Iris Murdoch published Under the Net in 1954, and Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) followed a teacher in Edinburgh and her favourite pupils.

By the 1960s, many novelists had grown bored with plain realism and began to play with form. John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) tells a Victorian love story, but the narrator keeps stepping in to say that he is making it up, and the book offers more than one ending. Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber (1979) retells old fairy tales from the viewpoint of women. Writers like these are often called postmodern, because they doubt that any one story can claim to be the whole truth.

Many novels of the 1980s and 1990s went back to the past and asked how history is told. Graham Swift's Waterland (1983), Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (1984) and A. S. Byatt's Possession (1990), which won the Booker Prize, belong to this group. Hilary Mantel won the Booker twice, for Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), by retelling the life of Thomas Cromwell, the chief minister of Henry VIII.

Kazuo Ishiguro, born in Japan and raised in England, won the Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day (1989). It tells of an English butler who slowly sees that he gave his life to a master on the wrong side of history. Ishiguro received the Nobel Prize in 2017.

Writers from outside Britain

The end of the empire sent writers in two directions. Some travelled to Britain, and others stayed at home and wrote back to Britain. Samuel Selvon, who had left Trinidad for London, wrote The Lonely Londoners (1956), about Caribbean men learning to live in a cold and unfriendly city. He told it in a Caribbean English that sounds like speech and song. Jean Rhys, born in Dominica, wrote Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). It gives a history to the first wife of Mr Rochester, the so-called madwoman of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and shows her as a woman destroyed by marriage and colonial prejudice.

In Nigeria, Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart (1958) in answer to English novels that showed Africa as a dark and empty place. It tells how missionaries and officials of the empire come to the Igbo village of Umuofia and break its way of life. Wole Soyinka, a playwright and poet, became the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1986. In the Caribbean, Derek Walcott of St Lucia retold Homer's story in the long poem Omeros (1990) and won the Nobel Prize in 1992. V. S. Naipaul, born in Trinidad to an Indian family, wrote A House for Mr Biswas (1961) and won the Nobel Prize in 2001.

In India, writing in English had long been doubted as a borrowed language, though R. K. Narayan had made the small town of Malgudi famous. The change came with Salman Rushdie. His Midnight's Children (1981) follows Saleem Sinai, who is born at midnight on 15 August 1947, the moment of India's independence. He and other children born in that first hour have magical gifts. The novel mixes real history with magic, in a style called magic realism that the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez had made famous in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). It won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was later twice chosen as the best of all Booker winners.

Rushdie's next novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), angered many Muslims, who felt that it insulted their faith. On 14 February 1989, Iran's leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, called for Rushdie's death, and Rushdie lived under police protection for years. In 2022, he was attacked as he prepared to give a lecture in New York state. Other Indian writers followed. Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997) won the Booker Prize, and so did Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss (2006) and Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008). In poetry, Nissim Ezekiel, A. K. Ramanujan and Kamala Das gave Indian English verse a modern voice.

In Britain, the children of migrants began to write about the country as home. Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000) follows families of Jamaican, Bangladeshi and English origin in north London. Andrea Levy's Small Island (2004) goes back to the Windrush years to tell the story from the migrants' side.

Criticism and scholarship

Criticism changed as quickly as the writing. In 1948, F. R. Leavis had published The Great Tradition, which named a short list of English novelists as the only ones worth serious study. Many younger scholars, who reached universities after the Education Act of 1944, felt that this list left out their own lives. Raymond Williams, the son of a Welsh railway worker, answered in Culture and Society (1958) by arguing that culture belongs to ordinary people and not only to the educated few. A year earlier, in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), the Canadian scholar Northrop Frye had offered a different kind of order, a map of the main patterns and kinds of literature.

In the late 1960s, new ideas arrived from France. In 1966, the philosopher Jacques Derrida gave a lecture at Johns Hopkins University in the United States that shook the belief that words have one fixed meaning. In 1967, Roland Barthes published "The Death of the Author", which argued that readers, not writers, make meaning. Together, these ideas are called poststructuralism.

Feminist critics asked where women stood in literature. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) had already asked why women were treated as secondary. Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970), Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own (1977) and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) studied women writers and the images of women in men's books.

The end of empire produced its own criticism. Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) argued that European writers had drawn the East as strange, weak and in need of rule, which helped to justify empire. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988) and Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture (1994) carried the study further. Meanwhile, Linda Hutcheon's A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) described novels that retell history while doubting how history is told. Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983) explained all these schools to students and became a textbook itself. In 2004, Randall Stevenson and Bruce King mapped the period for the Oxford English Literary History, Stevenson from 1960 and King from 1948 under the title The Internationalization of English Literature.

An age still being written

The age that began in 1945 has not ended, and its literature keeps changing as its readers change. The vote to leave the European Union in 2016 and the pandemic of 2020 gave them new subjects, such as borders, home and loneliness.

The prizes show how far English literature has travelled. In 2019, the Booker judges broke their own rule against sharing the prize and gave it jointly to Margaret Atwood of Canada, for The Testaments, and to Bernardine Evaristo of Britain, for Girl, Woman, Other. Evaristo's novel follows twelve characters, most of them Black British women, and she was the first Black woman to win. In 2021, Abdulrazak Gurnah, who was born in Zanzibar and lives in Britain, won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The 2025 Booker Prize went to David Szalay's Flesh. That same year, the International Booker Prize went to Banu Mushtaq's Heart Lamp, the first book originally written in Kannada to win it.

Tom Stoppard, who had written for the stage since the 1960s, died in November 2025, aged eighty-eight. The writers who began this age have mostly gone, and new ones are taking their place. No one can yet say what name literary history will finally give to this age, because its writers are still at work.

Writers and works

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Sources

• Andrew Sanders, The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1994.
• Margaret Drabble (ed.), The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 6th edition, Oxford University Press, 2000.
• M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 11th edition, Cengage Learning, 2015.
• Randall Stevenson, The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 12: 1960-2000: The Last of England?, Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Bruce King, The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 13: 1948-2000: The Internationalization of English Literature, Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, Doubleday, 1961.
• Edward W. Said, Orientalism, Pantheon Books, 1978.
• Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950, Chatto and Windus, 1958.
• Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, Blackwell, 1983.
• Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, Routledge, 1988.

Afsar Khan, Ph.D. English