Supporting and Resisting the Myth of the Blitz

Abstract

Heavily mythologized at the time, the London Blitz is still memorialized in ways that sustain a sense of national pride. The concept was initiated by Angus Calder in The People’s War (1969) which succeeded in bolstering what it attempted to debunk. Lola Serraf uses Susan Ertz’s Anger in the Sky (1943) to reconsider the ‘Myth of the Blitz’, showing how the novel explores conflicting intellectual arguments for, and justifications of, war and airs differing perspectives on British pressure for active American military involvement. Serraf rejects the categorization of Ertz’s novel as propaganda by foregrounding opposing discourses through the conflicting voices of her characters. Calder’s revision of his ideas The Myth of the Blitz, almost half a century after Ertz’s description of the devastating effects of the Blitz on London and on outlying rural English life, helped to deconstruct the image of a wholly patriotic country united in adversity.