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Already Seen? Look Back in Anger, Déjàvu, and Postmodern Historiography

Abstract:Historiography has enshrined the British 1950s as a decade of affluence and apathy, smugly unaware of the cultural shift its swinging successor the sixties will effect. In this way the stage is set for Look Back in Anger as revolutionary moment, yet a recent bout of academic revisionism has sought to question the epochal importance of John Osborne's 1956 play. Contemporary critical demotions of the play must initiate a reappraisal of its enduring metonymic status. This paper considers a range of the paratexts surrounding Look Back in Anger — reviews, authorial comment, academic analysis, filmic interpretations, and Osborne's 1992 sequel Déjàvu — to trace the implications of this reappraisal and to assess the extent to which this postmodernist reimagining of literary history might involve, in the middle-aged Jimmy Porter's words, ‘a deluded sense of recall.