About the Book:The Counter-Memorial Impulse describes the tendency in 20th-century English fiction to resist commemorative models and to treat grief as an occasion for social critique. At a time when public memorial projects are hotly debated in the media and ‘archive fever’ has gripped the humanities, this book offers timely and original insights the literary treatment of mourning and remembrance. Sarah Henstra explores the relationship between (post)modern innovations in narrative form and the historical events that transformed England’s collective sense of self during this period. Henstra’s unconventional readings of well-loved novels by Ford Madox Ford, Doris Lessing, and Jeanette Winterson illustrate the new approaches demanded by such ‘unmournable’ conditions as post-imperial melancholy, nuclear fear, and homophobia. These writers take iconoclastic, often controversial, approaches to commemoration, and as such their work suggests possibilities for artistic and political intervention at a particularly critical moment in England’s relationship to its past.