The Contemporary English Novel [antikvár]

Preface The English novel in the period since the Second World War—a point at which we may see distinct signs of a break or a change in the fictional tradition—has not generally received a very enthusiastic press. The writing of this period has been reported, by those who have considered it, as a late, lowered and unambitious phase in the long history of the English novel. When critics write about 'modem English fiction', they write usually about a season of achievement which remains in one sense ours, but in another sense is evidently over: they write about that period from around the turn of the century to about 1940 or 1941, when Virginia Woolf and James Joyce died, and a whole creative phase in the remaking of the novel into an instrument of modem expression seemed to come to an end. That period is, of course, outstanding, extraordinary, and genuinely modem. It is dense with major achievements and major figures; it remains in a real way a contemporary fiction, retaining its significance and relevance for our lives now. But time passes, and increasingly that fiction becomes an historical fiction. Major novels have lasting values, but they are also made out of the cultural, stylistic and linguistic opportunities of a particular era, a particular aesthetic synthesis. This is one reason why the novel changes, one reason why we no longer think of ourselves as in a 'modernist' universe. And if we still live within the power of and the sphere of that 'modern' novel, we also need, or merit, a novel for our present times, for the end-of-the-century season in which we live. Yet it is not widely thought that in England we have one, of any great significance. One essential purpose of this book is to challenge that judgement, that neglect, and some of the folklore behind it. For there are growing grounds for disputing the judgements and challenging the neglect of a fiction that, while it has certainly not been driven by the same sense of radical historical and formal transformation that shaped the early twentieth-century novel in England, and has not generated talents of the same scale and confidence, has nonetheless been complex, significant, highly interesting, highly various, and has also been 'ours' in the most immediate sense—for it has sought to find language,