Book Review: Beyond the Call of Duty: The Loss of British Commonwealth Mercantile and Service Women at Sea during the Second World War

2006 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 615-617
Author(s):  
Jo Stanley
Author(s):  
C. L. Innes

This chapter discusses migrant fiction in British and Irish literature. The end of the Second World War and the closing stages of the British empire brought significant changes, making more complex the ambivalent attitudes of the British towards the peoples of what now became (in 1948) the British Commonwealth of Nations. As it was gradually acknowledged that the expatriate professional and administrative classes in the former empire would be replaced by indigenous persons, increasingly large numbers were sent from the colonies to acquire the British professional training and higher education often required for an appointment in their home countries. It is in this context that migrant fiction, both by and about immigrant communities, was created in Britain in the decades immediately following the Second World War. One response to the disorientation experienced in Britain was to recreate the community back home, to rediscover and understand what one had left.


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