The Writing of Anxiety

This book is a study of wartime anxiety in the fiction, art, and psychoanalytic writings of mid-century Britain.

Whereas trauma and memory have come to dominate discussions of World War Two, Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that it was in fact the representation of anxiety – a state in which we look forwards as well as backwards – that emerged most forcefully in mid-century wartime culture. For two crucial but understudied second generations, the psychoanalysts who came after Freud and whose work thrived in 1940s Britain, and the later modernists who had cut their teeth on the expressive verve of their First World War-shocked elders, thinking about anxiety, she argues, was a way of imagining how it might be possible to stay within a history that frequently undermined a sense of self and agency.

LYNDSEY STONEBRIDGE is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of East Anglia, UK. Her publications include The Destructive Element: British Psychoanalysis and Modernism, Reading Melanie Klein (edited with John Phillips), and British Fiction After Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century (edited with Marina Mackay).

List of Illustrations * Acknowledgements * Introduction: Dreading Forward: The Writing of Anxiety at Mid-Century * Anxiety at a Time of Crisis: Psychoanalysis and Wartime * The Childhood of Anxiety * Bombs and Roses: The Writing of Anxiety in Henry Green’s Caught * Bombs, Birth and Trauma: Henry Moore and D.W.Winnicott * The Writing of Post-War Guilt: Rose Macaulay and Rebecca West * Hearing them Speak: Voices in Bion, Muriel Spark and Penelope Fitzgerald * Postscript * Bibliography * Index