Postwar Interiorities: Review of The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British and Anglophone Novel

Abstract: The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British and Anglophone Novel: States of Repair reads the post-1945 British novel as attempts to reimagine and reassess the failed promise of the welfare state, understanding 1945 as a pivotal year that fostered the possibility of social transformation, though faltered. By examining how postwar infrastructures such as housing, healthcare, work, and the justice system configured, negotiated, and sometimes collided with individual subjectivities, Rich redefines what we have termed “contemporary literature” in Britain by consistently linking the development of national identity back to the ideation welfare state, famously epitomized by the 1942 Beveridge report. Rich argues that these novels continue to debate what constitutes care, community in the advent of reconstruction, even in retrospect.