Sara Martín Alegre P08/04540/02135

Recommended Readings
Waugh,�E.
(1945). 
Brideshead
Revisited
.
Orwell,�G.
(1949). 
1984
.
Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Hartley,�L.�P.
(1953). 
The
Go-Between
.
Golding,�W.
(1954). 
Lord of
the Flies
.
Spark,�M.
(1961). 
The Prime
of Miss Jean Brodie
.
Drabble,�M.
(1965). 
The
Millstone
.
Fowles,�J.
(1969). 
The French
Lieutenant's Woman
.
McEwan,�I.
(1978). 
The
Cement Garden
.
Weldon,�F.
(1983). 
The Life
and Loves of a She-Devil
.
Ballard,�J.�G.
(1984). 
Empire
of the Sun
.
Scene from 
Brideshead Revisited
, a film made
for television, based on the novel by Evelyn
Waugh.
The early 1950s brought a 
new� interest� in� the� present
, possibly
as a reaction against the nostalgic backward look at an essentially
phoney world from which many –above all, the lower middle and
working classes– were excluded. Leaving aside the beginnings of the
post-colonial novel, what happened in the 1950s novel is that the
margins of culture moved to the centre, expressing a generalised
discontent, which was paralleled in the plays of the Angry Young Men
and some of the poetry of The Movement.
At the time, this discontent was defined as political discontent, but it would
seem now, rather, to be lower middle-class frustration at being denied a place
in the vanished world of the upper classes portrayed by pre-war Literature.
Thanks to the new educational opportunities opened up by post-war Labour
governments, new lower middle-class and working class writers, who often
came from places other than London, found themselves in a cultural world in
which they were simultaneously strangers and also the rising new stars.
William�Cooper
's 
Scenes from Provincial Life
(1950) was the mirror in which
the new writers found an appropriate model to narrate the discontent of the
post-war generation. Novels such as