The modern british novel [antikvár]

Preface This book is about the British novel — perhaps I had better say the novel as it has developed in Britain — over the remarkable, enormously productive hundred years from the end of the last century to our own present end-of-century. A hundred years is a long time in the history of the novel, and ours has been a century of profound and turbulent change. Not surprisingly, then, all the terms of my title — with the possible exception of the definite article — are contentious, or as we say now contested. "Modern" has a weak and a strong meaning, referring both to an overall period, the "modern" century, ours, and to a distinctive tradition of avant-garde literary and artistic experiment. As will soon be seen, I am interested in the intricate relations that have developed between these two. "British" is a term open to many arguments, not least because many of the most important novelists sailing under this flag of convenience are not British at all. Henry James was American, Conrad was Polish, George Moore and James Joyce were Irish, Wyndham Lewis was born on a ship at sea; many of the writers we claim today as part of British writing have names like Ishiguro, Okri, Rushdie, Mo, Kureishi and Zameenzad. Meanwhile many British writers live and think elsewhere, and have seen their tradition very much from the outside. However far we go back the "English" or, to use the now preferred term, "British" tradition has always been in some basic sense international, linked with travel, exile, emigration and exterior influence. And the idea of reading any literature, even one as eclectic and pluri-cultural as the British, in national terms has increased in difficulty in our international, global-village age. Even so, I ix