The Historical Novels

Abstract

The ambitiousness and guarded optimism with which Warner and his fellow-writers had begun their careers seemed finally to dwindle away in the atmosphere of lowered horizons and anxiety not to be fooled which rather characterised the 1950s — and which, incidentally, exerted such a powerful retrospective influence on subsequent critical views of the 1930s. With the exception of the ‘entertainment novel’ Escapade (1953), in which he attempted to burlesque his own allegorical methods in a wry acknowledgement of their newly-inappropriate portentousness, Warner altered the course of his literary career and concentrated on translation from the classics. Thucydides and Plutarch offered a more secure canvas on which he could trace the same interests — power, the relationship of individual and mass, the motive force of ideas, the dynamic progress of history — for which comparable models were no longer available in the contemporary world.