Postscript

Abstract

The claim is not, of course, either that ‘literature of crisis’ as defined in this book constitutes a unique phenomenon in literary history, wholly specific and exclusive to the period under consideration; or that it offers a definitive and comprehensive characterisation of literary production between 1910 and 1922. Nevertheless, if, as has been suggested in earlier chapters, a measure of this literature is its confrontation of contemporary issues, it would after all be surprising if the grouping could not be extended. A salient feature of the literature of crisis is indeed its engagement with the contemporary situation, even where the immediacy of that engagement is blurred by oblique reference or by an ambivalent posture; and, certainly, many other texts of this period articulate the Condition of England as one of crisis. The familiar motifs recur: social fission, and the split between material power and humane values; sexuality and sterility; madness and hysteria; violence, death, murder and suicide. We find, too, that quality of end-direction which pushes towards a normative configuration, allied to an end-anxiety attaching to narrative closure and to the crisis-in-the-world which the fiction seeks, as it were, to resolve.