R.C. Sherriff’s The Hopkins Manuscript (1939) and Transformative Disaster Fiction

This article argues that a significant tonal shift occurs in British disaster literature after World War Two. To accomplish this, it establishes the thematic consistencies of disaster fiction in the first half of the twentieth century, formulates a new terminology with which to discuss texts with a transformative narrative structure, and offers an analysis of R.C. Sherriff’s The Hopkins Manuscript (1939). The analysis illustrates how Sherriff’s novel is a metaphor for its socio-political context and anticipates the tonal change evident in post-war disaster literature.