Fantasy, the Bomb, and the Greening of Britain

Book excerpt: This work explores the essential ideas and assumptions of three very different cultural developments in post-World War II Britain: the fantasy literature of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and the response it provoked; the protests that emerged in the late 1950s against Britain's possession of nuclear weapons; and the early Green movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It shows that these three products of middle-class culture should be placed within the British intellectual and cultural tradition of romantic protest against industrialised society.