Historical Context: Post-War Britain and Beyond

AQA's Paper 2 Option B — Texts in Shared Contexts: Modern Times, Literature from 1945 to the Present Day — asks you to study literary texts within the historical, social and cultural contexts that shaped them. Before you can do that confidently, you need a working knowledge of the period itself. This lesson provides the contextual framework you will draw on throughout every text you study.

The Aftermath of the Second World War (1945–1960)

A Changed Nation

Britain emerged from the war victorious but economically exhausted. Rationing continued until 1954 — longer than in defeated Germany. The human cost was enormous: approximately 450,000 British military and civilian deaths, cities devastated by bombing (the Blitz destroyed large areas of London, Coventry, Plymouth, and many other cities), and a generation psychologically scarred by total war.

Key Development	Detail
The Welfare State	The Beveridge Report (1942) identified five "Giant Evils": Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness. Clement Attlee's Labour government (1945–51) implemented its recommendations: the NHS (1948), National Insurance, council housing, and universal secondary education
Nationalisation	Coal, steel, railways, and utilities brought under state ownership. A fundamental shift in the relationship between state and economy
The Cold War	The wartime alliance with the Soviet Union collapsed. Britain tested its first nuclear weapon in 1952. The threat of nuclear annihilation shaped literature, culture, and psychology for four decades
Decolonisation	Indian independence (1947) began the dismantling of the British Empire. By the mid-1960s most of Africa and the Caribbean had gained independence

Literary Impact

Post-war literature reflected disillusionment, exhaustion, and anxiety about the new world order. The "Angry Young Men" of the 1950s — John Osborne (Look Back in Anger, 1956), Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim, 1954), Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1958) — rejected the genteel traditions of pre-war literature and gave voice to working-class frustration.

A-Level Tip: When analysing any post-1945 text, consider: what has the war done to these characters, this society, this language? Even texts that do not mention the war explicitly are shaped by its aftermath.

The 1960s and 1970s: Liberation and Conflict

Social Revolution

Development	Significance for Literature
Sexual revolution	The contraceptive pill (available from 1961); decriminalisation of homosexuality (1967); the Abortion Act (1967); the Divorce Reform Act (1969). Literature could now explore sexuality with unprecedented frankness
Feminism (Second Wave)	Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970); the Equal Pay Act (1970); the Sex Discrimination Act (1975). Women's voices and experiences moved to the centre of literary culture
Immigration and race	The Windrush generation (from 1948) and subsequent Commonwealth immigration transformed British society. The Race Relations Acts (1965, 1968, 1976) attempted to combat discrimination. Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech (1968) crystallised racist opposition
Counter-culture	The rejection of conformity, experimentation with drugs and communal living, anti-Vietnam War protests. Literature became more experimental, politically engaged, and diverse

Industrial Conflict

The 1970s saw escalating conflict between trade unions and government — the miners' strikes of 1972 and 1974, the "three-day week," the "Winter of Discontent" (1978–79). This class conflict is central to understanding texts such as Churchill's Top Girls (1982).

Thatcherism and Its Aftermath (1979–1997)

Margaret Thatcher's governments (1979–90) transformed Britain:

Policy	Impact
Privatisation	State industries sold off — gas, water, electricity, telecoms, steel
Monetarism	High interest rates, reduced public spending, inflation controlled at the cost of mass unemployment (over 3 million by 1983)
Anti-union legislation	Trade union power systematically curtailed. The miners' strike of 1984–85 was a defining moment
Individualism	"There is no such thing as society" — Thatcher's famous phrase encapsulated a philosophy of individual responsibility over collective welfare
The Falklands War (1982)	Military victory revived national confidence and secured Thatcher's re-election

Literary Responses to Thatcherism

Caryl Churchill's Top Girls (1982) is the most directly political response on your course. Its overlapping dialogue, non-linear structure, and juxtaposition of historical and contemporary women interrogate the costs of Thatcher-era "success." Other key literary responses include:

Martin Amis, Money (1984) — satirising greed and excess
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) — race, class, and identity in Thatcher's Britain
Pat Barker, Regeneration (1991) — the psychological costs of conflict, resonating with Falklands-era anxieties

Post-1990: Multiculturalism, Globalisation and Identity

Development	Significance
Multiculturalism	Britain became increasingly diverse. "Britishness" was contested and redefined. Post-colonial literature — Zadie Smith (White Teeth, 2000), Andrea Levy (Small Island, 2004), Bernardine Evaristo (Mr Loverman, 2013) — explored hybrid identities
New Labour (1997–2010)	Tony Blair's government: devolution, minimum wage, Human Rights Act (1998), the Iraq War (2003). The Iraq War generated significant literary responses
Digital revolution	The internet, social media, and globalisation transformed communication, community, and identity
Financial crisis (2008)	Austerity politics, growing inequality, and the erosion of the welfare state created new anxieties
Brexit (2016)	The vote to leave the EU exposed deep divisions in British society — generational, geographical, educational, and class-based

Key Contextual Themes for Paper 2

When analysing texts for Paper 2, you should be able to connect your reading to these recurring contextual themes:

Class — How do texts represent class conflict, social mobility, and inequality?
Gender — How have changing gender roles shaped literary representation?
Race and Empire — How do texts engage with immigration, post-colonial identity, and racism?
Political ideology — How do texts respond to the welfare state, Thatcherism, or neoliberalism?
War and its aftermath — How do the Second World War, the Cold War, and subsequent conflicts shape literary consciousness?
Identity — How do texts explore the construction, performance, and fragmentation of identity?

Exam Advice: AO3 (context) is not about listing historical facts. It is about demonstrating how contextual factors shape the production and reception of literary texts. Always connect your contextual knowledge to specific textual features — language, form, structure, and narrative technique.

Timeline of Key Dates

Date	Event
1945	End of WWII; Labour landslide; Attlee becomes PM
1948	NHS established; Windrush arrives
1956	Suez Crisis — end of imperial pretension
1963	Profumo affair; Beatlemania; Plath's The Bell Jar
1968	Student protests; Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech
1979	Thatcher becomes PM
1982	Falklands War; Churchill's Top Girls premiered
1984–85	Miners' strike
1989	Fall of the Berlin Wall; end of the Cold War
1997	New Labour; Blair becomes PM
2001	9/11; War on Terror begins
2008	Financial crisis
2016	Brexit referendum

Approaching Context in Your Essays

The strongest essays do not bolt context on as a separate paragraph. They weave contextual understanding into close reading. For example:

Weak: "Churchill wrote Top Girls during the Thatcher era. Thatcher was the first female Prime Minister."

Strong: "Churchill's overlapping dialogue — in which women speak simultaneously without listening to one another — formally enacts the fragmentation of feminist solidarity that Churchill saw as a consequence of Thatcher's individualist ideology. The play's structure embodies its political argument: that the 'top girls' who succeed in a competitive, individualist society do so at the expense of other women."

Notice how the strong example integrates context, form, and argument. This is what AO3 looks like at the highest level.