Abstract

This thesis studies the effects of the Second World War on the portrayal of youth in six British novels published between 1939 and 1946: Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear , Barbara Noble's Doreen , Henry Green's Caught , Nevil Shute's Pied Piper , James Hanley's No Direction and Evelyn Waugh's Put Out More Flags . It focuses on how the authors tended to use the younger generations as a canvas on which could be painted a possible future in order to bridge the gap between the social and political changes taking place between the Victorian and the World War II eras. It analyses the distinctive metaphorical qualities the writers ascribed to their young characters against a backdrop of war. It not only rectifies the lack of attention by scholars to Second World War British fiction, it also works at understanding the nature of the population's mindset to this unprecedented exposure to violence in the domestic sphere. This study argues that the children in British war texts of the Second World War era are not simply additional characters to the construction of the narrative, but function in part as a metaphor to English society itself.