There has been a tendency among some critics to see post-1945 British literature as lacking in power and scope compared to the great age of modernism that preceded it. This course will set out to strongly refute such a perspective by considering this period as one of the most complex and fascinating in British literary history. The texts in this course represent both a continued interplay of modernist (and postmodernist) experiment and an impulse towards social realism and political commitment. They’re informed by a range of concerns centring on moral responsibility, individual freedom, personal, social and national constructions of identity, and the status and definition of the literary text itself. With these contexts in mind, we’ll read works by four novelists (Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson, and Zadie Smith), two playwrights (Caryl Churchill and debbie tucker green), and one short story writer (Angela Carter), as well as a selection of short poems (by Linton Kwesi Johnson, Tom Leonard, Philip Larkin, and Jackie Kay) and a prose/poetry text (by David Dabydeen). We’ll also watch a film by Hanif Kureishi and Stephen Frears. In their work, these artists are engaged in an ongoing analysis of contemporary culture and social process, and throughout, we’ll be alert to the following issues, among others: the struggle between radicalism and conservatism; the relationship between aesthetics and politics; and the role of gender, class, race, and sexual identities in the construction of the self.