Midcentury Suspension

How did literary artists confront the middle of a century already defined by two global wars and newly faced with a nuclear future? Claire Seiler argues that a sense of suspension—a feeling of being between beginnings and endings, recent horrors and opaque horizons—shaped transatlantic literary forms and cultural expression in this singular moment.

Claire Seiler is associate professor of English at Dickinson College.

Allan Hepburn, author of A Grain of Faith: Religion in Mid-Century British Literature:
In Midcentury Suspension, Claire Seiler offers the most scholarly study of the midcentury to date—the literary midcentury in all its irresolution, time-consciousness, anxiety, and nuclear expectancy. With a pitch-perfect sense of detail, Seiler draws upon unknown archival sources to explain what history felt like to anglophone writers in Britain and the United States. Written with great verve, this book is a lucid—and necessary—account of why the midcentury matters.

Marina MacKay, author of Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic:
This is a powerfully illuminating and eloquent reconstruction of a moment when transatlantic writers understood themselves as citizens not so much of particular places as of their own fraught and ambiguous historical period. Anyone thinking about early postwar literature will have to reckon with the implications of this absolutely compelling book.

Deak Nabers, author of Victory of Law: The Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil War, and American Literature:
It is impossible not to be impressed by the highly accomplished results on offer in Claire Seiler's reconfiguration of early postwar transatlantic literature in terms of the concept of the "midcentury" and the forms of temporal and theoretical suspension she identifies with it. I suspect that her revisionist efforts to construct the intellectual framework of the midcentury and its suspensions will significantly reshape our understanding of this period for years to come.