Lost Children and Postwar Realism

Abstract

This essay uses two novels about the contested identities of children lost during World War II – Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness (1950) and Marghanita Laski’s Little Boy Lost (1949) – to explore the political and consolatory work realist conventions performed after 1945. Noting how these children exceed the representational capacity of a tradition committed to presenting character and identity as singular, stable, and knowable, it frames the bundled recourse to the problem-solving powers of nineteenth-century plots visible at the ends of both novels as a challenge both to Nazism, and to the legacy of the total war which defeated it.