After the War

Abstract

In the 1950s, when Murdoch’s novels began to be published, the literary context was largely non-theoretical and untheorized. Much English writing of the fifties displayed a modest or chauvinistic insularity. The powerfully influential literary critic F.R. Leavis concentrated on literature written in English. New Criticism pretended to eschew contextualization.¹ New Lines, a collection of verse by a new generation of poets including Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, DJ. Enright, Elizabeth Jennings, Thorn Gunn, Donald Davie and John Wain, was lucid and proudly unpretentious. The editor, Robert Conquest, explained, ‘it submits to no great systems of theoretical constructs nor agglomeration of unconscious commands. It is free from both mystical and logical compulsions and — like modern philosophy — is empirical in its attitude to all that comes […] [it refuses] to abandon a rational structure and comprehensible language’.² He was contrasting these poets with their modernist and surrealist predecessors, who were international, experimental, obscure, preoccupied with the unconscious and with myth. The new play that characterized the decade was John Osborne’s realist, ‘fourth-wall’, three-act Look Back in Anger, which was angry largely at a boring and unheroic new era, not the equally successful Waiting for Godot, which was mysterious, theologically haunted, formally original and first written in French.