World War II in Contemporary English-language Literature

World War II remains popular in English-language literature. The article analyses novels by leading British and Australian writers dedicated to the war that were written in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The analysis is conducted against a broad historical background; the author refers to historical and documentary sources, as well as facts of the national literary tradition development. The main research methods include historical and literary analysis of the novels and, more particularly, their characteristics. The goal of the analysis is to identify the continuity of trends in the depiction of war — twenty-first-century novels are compared to those of the twentieth century. At the same time, the analysis helps to identify new trends that have appeared in the literature of the new century. The following novels by the English writer Kate Atkinson Life After Life (2013), A God in Ruins (2015), Transcription (2018) and by the Australian writer Richard Flanagan The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013) are studied in detail. The article shows that such trends as documentary basis, an appeal to the experience of World War I (the Great War in the minds of the British), and an interest in descriptions of the Blitz are still relevant for twenty-first-century English-language literature. On the other hand, contemporary authors draw a direct link between the images of the war to problems of national identity. Besides, all the war novels under discussion are characterized by a complex narrative structure, a unique representation of time and space continuum, other features of post-postmodernist prose (variable endings, non-linear structure, etc.), which, in the author’s opinion, is explained by the unique historical period of the creation of the novels.