This project studies the various pressures on literature and the state to repair the trauma and violence of World War II. Reading a series of British and Anglophone novels that return to WWII, the project explores the afterlives of Britain's postwar transition from a warfare to welfare state, which often take the form of a tension between war-making and caretaking long after the immediate postwar period. The dissertation conceptualizes the postwar condition as one caught between two infinitudes that characterize the uneasy transition between violence and repair: the spectre of never-ending war and the often Sisyphean labor of reparation.