This Introduction offers a survey of how criticism to date has conceived of the relationship between mass violence and the creative imagination, arguing that little has been done to destabilise the view that when literary works take the destruction of bodies, minds, and ideals in times of war seriously, they find their structures and surfaces warped. Identifying Jay Winter’s pioneering work in the field of cultural history as running counter to this trend, it positions this study as likewise animated by a belief that the wars of the last century not only sparked aesthetic experiments and the abandonment of traditional imaginative structures; they also impelled forms of creative counterfactual thinking whose aims were reparative, preservatory, and consolatory. The concepts of ‘unlived lives’ and ‘lives unlived’ (which will be used to explore various imaginative modes of resistance to violence, loss, and change) are defined. The book’s aims are situated relative to the ethos of the ‘new modernist studies’ and its place periodisation debate explained. The combination of historical, biographical, and close readings deployed in the six chapters to come are given careful justification – as is the selection of Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen, and Kazuo Ishiguro as the book’s central writers.

British theatre’s post-war cultural impact would be hard to deny, having produced generations of actors, writers, directors, and designers who have populated the world’s stages and screens. This vitality has often been explained in aesthetic terms, in the successive waves of generational artistic renewal in British theatre (from the ‘angry young men’ onwards). The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945 seeks to outline the discursive and material changes that have made this theatre possible; that is, the economic, infrastructural, and legislative structures that underpin what can and cannot be done in theatre and the structures and habits of discourse that govern what can and cannot be said about the theatre. Hence the book focuses on the working conditions of actors, writers, and directors; the economics of the West End, subsidised sector, and fringe; the theatre’s interaction with the British nation-state at the level of policy, theatre buildings, and in its nations and regions; finally, the book considers the theatre’s civic function, its changing engagement with audiences and the development of Black British and Queer theatre.

This Interlude between Part 1 and Part 2 of the book briefly considers the use and delayed currency of Shakespeare in the aftermath of the Russian War of 1853–56 (also known as the Crimean War), an unpopular conflict that nevertheless did not dampen the appeal of rousing militarism in Britain or position Shakespeare as a cultural figure through whom critical perspectives about the conduct of war could be presented. The Interlude concentrates on Charles Kean’s post-war Henry V at the Princess’s Theatre, London, in 1859, a production that does not contemporize the play’s events, but rather historicizes and distances them from its own time, reflecting a Victorian nostalgia for medieval history. It shows how the conditions of war and developments in war reporting can affect (and delay) the use of theatre for immediate wartime commentary. Shakespearean productions can be as much about forgetting or displacing contemporaneity, as invoking the specific contexts of a conflict or crisis, a pattern that recurs in the second part of the book.

This chapter considers the close interrelationship between theatre and cinema during the First World War. As well as looking at key examples of plays which were adapted into films such as The Better ‘Ole (1917) it looks at the relationship between the two modes of popular entertainment, emphasising, for example, how film screenings often incorporated or were incorporated into live performance, and how the two industries shared business practices. The chapter examines the economics and practices of cinema exhibiting, drawing parallels to the regional theatre circuits. It argues for the role of government-endorsed films such as The Battle of the Somme (1916) in establishing the respectability of cinema and demonstrates how from 1917 cinema could shift to being more of a source of entertainment: a shift which threatened the theatre industry. It examines this competition through a focus on the growth of the ‘Super film’ and through attention to the dominance of American films on British screens. The chapter ends with a focus on post-war films. Through discussion the factual war films produced in the 1920s, as well as the fictional dramas, it highlights the ways in which post-war cinema became a means for mediating memory on the war.

This chapter takes up the mid-century politics of the Australian novel enacted in the terms dictated by the Cold War. Replicating the broader bipolar model of the cultural Cold War, the divide in Australia, mapped between modernism and realism, was complexly transnational, with vaunted stakes in the hot wars of the decolonising Asia Pacific and deconstructive receptions behind the Iron Curtain. The ideological debates of the cultural Cold War in Australia recall a faith in realism as a liberatory mode that is in danger of becoming unreadable. Australian post-war realism reached out to Indigenous issues, new migrants, women and working-class readers in structured and inclusive ways. Blurring into popular genres and facing strict federal censorship, realism’s traditional interest in the quotidian was mediated by its attention to topicality, or to the defining mid-century social issues motivating readers. This chapter is bookended by the scandalous court case of communist Frank Hardy for his Power Without Glory (1950), prosecuted for criminal libel in Australia’s McCarthyite moment, and Gerald Glaskin’s No End to the Way (1965), Australia’s first out gay novel, banned by the censors and marketed as ‘penetrating – honest – telling it like it is’.

The Epilogue addresses the legacies of wartime neutrality and collaboration in Macau. The war period provided a peculiar blueprint for later developments in terms of bilateral Sino–Portuguese relations and of local practices in the enclave, including towards new waves of refugees. The Epilogue also covers recent written and visual representations of wartime neutrality and collaboration in Macau.

This chapter demostrates that the ambiguities of wartime neutrality in Macau continued to haunt China’s relations with Portugal in the post-war years. Five interconnected issues relating to Portuguese neutrality evidence China’s post-war quest for justice and recognition: the re-establishment of regular diplomatic contacts, the handling of Japanese property, the extradition of suspects of war crimes and collaboration, the abolition of extraterritoriality and critiques of neutrality in calls to return Macau to Chinese rule. These issues raised questions about the meaning of justice and the legitimacy of who got to wield it. In its relations with a small and relatively weak European colonial power, China sought to affirm its new post-war international status. However, this process was constrained by resistance to the Nationalists’ anti-imperialist goals in South China and by the changing fortunes of Nationalist power as the Chinese Civil War unfolded.

Chapter 5 describes efforts by UNRRA and the WHO to rebuild a health statistics reporting system from 1943, when UNRRA took over the LNHO’s international epidemiological intelligence efforts. The WHO also developed an all-encompassing statistical system to gather statistics collected through research, administration, and policy-making. Just like the LNHO, the WHO established a tiered network for spreading its statistical practices, but sought broader geographic coverage. By including statisticians from different regions in the standard-making process, the WHO took local variation into account when making standards. A case study on the Republic of China – which still ruled the mainland in 1943 but was exiled to Taiwan in 1949 – shows that UNRRA and the WHO’s statistical reporting was often undermined by geopolitics and administrative constraints.

These days ‘Europe’ is assumed to mean the European Union and Brussels. The majority of European states are part of the EU, and its various policies have a profound impact on its member states and the international system. It is therefore easy to equate Europe with the European Union, or at least with international cooperation in Europe. This chapter argues that such an approach is problematic, particularly from a historical perspective. It underestimates two aspects: firstly, the European Community as the EU’s predecessor was a fragile latecomer in a densely populated field of international organisations. Seventy years ago (and more recently too) it appeared rather unlikely that this particular organisation would one day come to be identified with Europe as a whole. And secondly, the integration process was not only shaped by the histories of the participating states and the general historical context, but also influenced by a veritable web of relationships with other Western European organisations and transnational forums. Europe was never just the EU, and the EU never all of Europe. So we need to understand how that equivalence became so strong and how the EC was able to morph from humble origins into Europe’s pre-eminent international entity.

War, sadly, has always been part of human affairs, however much poets and ordinary people from antiquity onwards have longed for the blessings of peace. From earliest times states have allied with each other, promising not to make war on each other and, often, to defend the other from attack. The subject of this volume, however, is not peace but peacekeeping: the use of members of armed forces (as well as police and other civilians), working in a multinational environment in the wake of conflict, helping bring about conditions that will allow the parties to the conflict to build a more peaceable future. The cardinal qualities of peacekeepers, as against those engaged in fighting wars, are that they should use the minimum level of violence necessary to achieve their goals and that at some level they should be impartial in the disputes between the parties. Importantly, they are representatives of the international community, not of their own country’s government and their own national interests. That is why peacekeeping is conducted by multinational forces, and unilateral efforts by one state to conduct ‘peacekeeping’ are liable to be regarded with suspicion.