Paper Details

Name: Biresh Kumar
Country: India

Year: 2026
Volume: Volume No: 13, Issue No: 1 (January-June)
Page Number: 90-97
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19730303

ABSTRACT
Angus Wilson’s post-war fiction repeatedly tests the boundary between private desire and public virtue, staging sexuality not as a marginal theme but as a privileged site through which modern Britain’s moral vocabulary is exposed, strained, and revised. This study argues that Wilson’s satire operates as a disciplined ethical instrument: it refuses both prurient sensationalism and pious moralism, instead diagnosing how sexual lives are regulated by class habits, institutional power, and liberal self-congratulation. Through close readings of Hemlock and After, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot, Late Call, and No Laughing Matter, with contextual reference to Wilson’s essays and interviews, the study shows how Wilson’s “mixed” satiric method combines comic exposure with psychological seriousness. Across these works, sexuality becomes the narrative pressure point that reveals hypocrisy in philanthropic culture, academic and ecclesiastical gatekeeping, domestic respectability, and post-war “permissive” rhetoric. Wilson’s moral vision is not reductively punitive; it is diagnostic and revisionary, insisting that ethical life depends on truthfulness about desire, responsibility to others, and resistance to institutionalised bad faith.

Keywords: Angus Wilson, satire, sexuality, morality, post-war Britain, hypocrisy,
permissive society