Sara Martín Alegre P08/04540/02135

Post-modernism
can thus be said to be a new cultural atmosphere in which the
writer is inevitably aware of this open choice between 
tradition
and 
experimentalism
, rather than a continuation of Modernism or
a reaction against it. Post-war novelists cannot escape the shadow
of either Modernism or Victorianism and must accommodate both
in their work. Some have produced a new 
synthesis
–which is
what is really characteristic of post-modernism– while others have
openly acknowledged their allegiance to either literary tradition or
experimentation.

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© FUOC
• P08/04540/02135
15
Post-War English Literature 1945-1990
As far as the post-war novel is concerned, the post-modernist synthesis was
relatively slow to come, if it came at all, for there seemed to be a need to first
define the 
new�contours�of�social�reality
after the war before resuming the
project of Modernism.
2.1. Traditionalism: between the past and the present
In the period between 1945 and 1955, a 
nostalgic�look
at the lost pre-war
past was combined with 
a�look�at�the�new�reality
faced by the generation
growing up in the 1940s, often in provincial surroundings.
Novels such as 
Evelyn�Waugh
's 
Brideshead Revisited
(1945) and 
L.�P.�Hartley
's
The Go-Between
(1953) analyse the present by looking backwards, searching for
the flaws that cause the desolation of the individual speaking in the present.
This return to a personal past shows, above all, why innocence has been the
main casualty of war, and suggests that despite its apparent placidity, the best
that the pre-war world could offer in social terms was inherently corrupt.
The idea that civilisation contains the seeds of corruption is perhaps best
expressed in 
William�Golding
's 
Lord of the Flies
(1954). In this novel Golding
does not examine a particular moment of the recent past, but childhood, as
the site where adult civilised values are implanted, only to find there sheer
brutality.