"Assesses the impact of World War II and the welfare state on literary fiction by focusing on how housing reconstruction created a sheltered space for the mediation between individual subjects and the social and geographical environments that they encountered. Argues writers spanning various social positions and aesthetic tendencies-Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Patrick Hamilton, Doris Lessing, Colin MacInnes, and Elizabeth Taylor-engaged with literary realism as a way to shape postwar life"--