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Some major trends in post-war British Fiction

Post-war literature and realism
The retreat from experimentation in the novel is the landmark of the immediate post-war years: it
implies a consistent re-questioning of Modernism, a distrust of modernistic aestheticism, and a
distrust in the power of art to salvage from history. In tune with a wider, European and non-
European background of existentialist and new humanist sweep, novelists often tackle the social
and ethical issue of fiction (the possibility/legitimacy of fictionalizing life): what is at stake is the
representation of a reality that defies comprehension. At the same time, this leads to a basic
reflection on realism in the arts that is also nourished by literary criticism and that will underlie the
following decades.
For British novelists, writing realistically entails attempts at representing the new post-war life:
the utterly changed context of social welfare and the advent of a new, more democratic society, the
realignment of social classes, and the emergence of new subjects, notably women and the non-
British (migrant or immigrant) population, and the shift to a mass-consumerist economic
dimension. Many writers start drawing attention to material aspects of life, to work, to the
expectations brought about by social reformism and political change, and to the shift in
relationships, often seen in generational, class- and gender-conditioned terms. No less than in the
theatre, writers focus on familiar settings; their groundtone adheres to the workaday experience in
their attempt to depict scenes from (an often provincial) British life. Of course many aspects of
social life do not emerge yet, due to the rather homogeneous profile of the mainstream writers of
that period: men, middle-class (or possibly of working-class origin with a middle-class education)
British and often English, though mainly belonging to de-centred regions. There are few exceptions
to this profile, variously embodied by Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim, 1954), Alan Sillitoe (Saturday
Night Sunday Morning, 1958; it became a film directed by K. Reisz in 1960), John Braine (Room at
the Top, 1957 ): such exceptions include Sam Selvon, who comes from a working-class and
immigrant background, which he depicts in The Lonely Londoners (19 ; Keith Waterhouse (Billy
Liar, 1959) and Nell Dunn, the author of novels (Up the Junction, 1963, Poor cow, 1967) that
anticipate various issues relating to the womans role and to the life of the new underclass brought
about by the new political and economic regime.
Compared to the imperatives of Modernism, the endorsement of realism looks like a basic
involution, a reactionary tendency. Formally it was, but the question is not so simple. What seems
central to such new trends, despite the relative narrow scope of their social grasp or the exclusion of
broader sections of society, is a concern with language or the social languages which had been
undergoing changes from the pre-war to the post-war period, and which needed representation. As
much as in the theatre and in poetry, the new generation was trying to extend the grammar of
literature.
Realism, however, is not the only paradigm of the post-war years, as shown by the fantasy/science-
fictional edge in the writing of William Golding (Lord of the Flies, 1954; the first movie based on

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the novel was directed by Peter Brook, 1963). The moral question of realism emerges in its
complexity in the work of a leading figure of post-war fiction, the novelist Doris Lessing (b. 1919).
Lessings life is wide in its wanderings, both existential and intellectual, and the broad range of her
writing plainly reflects this. She actually experiments both in short stories (London Observed,
African stories) and in broader canvasses of social lives, where her concern with realism merges
with a political (Africa in her Children of Violence sequence, 1953-69) science-fictional or mystic-
philosophical interest (Memoirs of a Survivor). Lessings considerable output still enjoys high
critical acclaim and a wide readership [2007 Nobel Prize for Literature], not least because of her
political views (left-wing and broadly socialist) and of her concern with the woman question. Both
issues are brought into focus through her early, breakthrough novel The Golden Notebook (1962).
In The Golden Notebook the main character, the writer Anna Wulf, is deliberately split into
different subjects, as her notebooks are, to explore the different layers of her multi-faceted
identity: four diaries: a black notebook, which is to do with Anna Wulf the writer; a red notebook,
concerned with politics; a yellow notebook in which I make stories out of my experience, and the
blue notebook which tries to be a diary. The Golden Notebook is a novel within the novel (a novel,
Free Women, is also written by Anna, and it frames the notebooks) where the narrator/character
trusts on the provisional formal composure and structure of fiction to fight the impending
fragmentation of a world which is growing more and more aware of conflicts.
Intertwining narration with self-analysis and political, psychological, philosophical and historical
digression, Lessing manages to pull the threads together, and her double Anna becomes the
(extreme) prototype of the writer and the woman who goes through self-exploration, taking the risk
of dissolution and mental disaggregation in order to find liberation or a state of creative diffusion.
From a literary point of view, then, the writers search for identity is a starting point for a reflection
on the creative relation between fiction and facts (as it might variously emerge thorough the
subgenres of the novel-within-the novel, autobiography, the diary or journal).
In the post-war years, such creative relation will be crucial to writers. At the same time, a writer
such as Doris Lessing foregrounds an equally central cluster of questions which revolve around the
fluid perception of identity. In the first place, from a psychological and social point of view, the
sense of identity (in terms of gender, as well as of ethnic belonging, of class) is neither self-centred
nor necessarily confrontational/oppositional, but essentially relational and it implies roles that are
socially constructed but also individually internalised and questioned. In the second place, from a
socio-political point of view, the emergence of individual or collective identity revolves on the twin
mechanisms of disempowerment/empowerment (the latter requiring a deep awareness of ones
position in a given society, and the notion of ones necessary independence from, but implication in,
the relation with the other).
Women and writing
One aspect of identity which Lessing addresses and which has been undergoing change in both
socio-political and cultural representation since the upheaval of feminism in the late 1960s is the
woman question. In the second half of the century, a basic concern with woman as the object of

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fictional worlds and as textual subjectivity is typical of both the more generally traditionalist (Fay
Weldon, Margaret Drabble, Anita Brookner) and more experimental writing (in different ways, Iris
Murdoch, Angela Carter, and A. S. Byatt). The merging of different genres has been one of the
most important devices, used by women writers to cope with an open idea of identity: for example,
A. S. Byatts work is marked by a constant interplay of fictional genres (Possession: a Romance,
1990), whereas Angela Carter is regarded as the representative of a new subgenre, the rewriting of
fables and fairy tales, which she revisits through gender concerns (The Bloody Chamber and
Other Stories, 1979).
The meta-literary aspect of women writers confronting with a possible female tradition leads to
interesting explorations of the link between past and present literature. Many women writers use
intertextuality (the formal/semantic relation of their work to other works) to cast a searching light
on the identity of woman within a range of both present and past social contexts. A literary case of
experimentation where identity is investigated through the vantage point of an ethnically displaced
narrator is Jean Rhyss Wide Sargasso Sea (1965) where the story of Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre
(1847) is charged with ethnic meaning: the novel is entirely revisited through the viewpoint of
Bertha (Rochesters legitimate wife in Jane Eyre, in her distant home in the West Indies). Rhyss
novel is a paradigm of womens writing and of its possible directions, but it also foreshadows other
novelists general concern with the relation of Great Britain to the former colonies: the perspective
which would eventually lead to postcolonial writing.
Concern which gender does not exclusively mean preoccupation with a womans identity, but
includes the issue of homosexual and transexual identity which gradually emerges in fiction. A
new voice in this respect is Jeanette Winterson (b.1959) who, raised in a strictly religious
climate, regards her religious and working-class environment as crucial to her training as a writer. A
number of contemporary issues, as well as a deep concern with love, interpersonal relationships,
sexual and gender identity, fall within the scope of her writing, which intertwines fiction with other
literary and non-literary genres. As she observes in a recent collection of essays, realism is hardly a
satisfying paradigm, reality being a dimension where a number of realities tend to coexist in ones
own life/lives.
Wintersons Written on the Body (1992) revolves on a more than metaphorical relation between
bodily messages and emotional/psychological state. The narrator/characters concern with the
body and the physical as a way to the emotional and the spiritual turns into a startling apprehension
the interdependence of all those aspects of life. This is important because Winterson leaves the
question of identity in the background: she challenges her readers by obscuring the
narrator/characters sexual identity (it might be a man as well as a woman) and such indeterminacy
shows very well the provisionality of any category, even the sexual: it shows the body as a
threshold where identities are what is realised on an interpersonal, intersubjective level, rather than
fixed essences or roles society might demand of individuals. Winterson comes to convey this
through mastering an individual blend of realistic and metaphoric language, drawing inspiration
from literature as well as from science, especially physics and chemistry. It is a deliberate interplay
of languages that charge her poetic prose with the potential intermingling of genres, registers and
micro-languages often regarded as incompatible.

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Realism, post-modernism: the question of history.
The departure from realistic modes noticed so far has often led to a kind of experimentation that
interlocks notions of reality and of fictional representation with the broad question of history and of
historical consciousness. The backdrop to this is provided by a twofold attack on the individual and
on history, both of which are perceived as the objects of a complex fragmentation (pinpointed by
Anna Wulf/Doris Lessings reflection in the reported passage see reading materials): the need to
write or rewrite history is deeply felt. In the U.K. both the post-colonial perspective addressed by
writers such as Jean Rhys and the growing, globalised awareness of/information over the realities
of distant realities open to new perspective in the novel. The relation between history and realism,
far from being extinguished, feeds the whole development of British fiction from the post-war years
onwards, leading to the disquieting reflections about recent history in John Banville (The
Untouchable, 1996) and Graham Swift (Shuttlecock, 1981; Waterland, 1983; Last Orders, 1996)
or in some noteworthy attempts at recasting realism, for example in the experimental fiction of
Julian Barnes (Flauberts Parrot, 1984, where the father of French realism becomes the object of
a experimental research though biography, history and fiction, or A History of the World in 10
Chapters, 1989, where fiction intermingles with philosophical sketches, parables, digressions, etc).
The unfixed status of the individual and of history has consequences for fiction, in that the very idea
of subject and of story are complicated by the changing socio-political panorama and by the
questioning of the so-called narratives- stories underwritten by recorded History: this concern,
defined as the indicator of a post-modern consciousness, breeds literary perspectives that move
away from realism and embrace a post-modernistic stance (the fragmentation of the subject, the
interplay between genres, intertextuality are all signs of this position).
The issue of history and of its subjects has been taken up by a number of Anglophone writers,
such as J.M. Coetzee, (Waiting for the Barbarians, Age of Iron, Disgrace Nobel Prize for
Literature) and often in the multi-cultural perspective offered by Salman Rushdie (b.1947).
Rushdies multicultural background (he was born in Bombay, but moved to the U.K. and has been
travelling all of his life) is the starting point for his work, which explores the borders between the
East and the West through a culturally complex stance. A major aspect of his work lies in the
mingling of facts and fiction, which underscores the importance of relativity and mediation in both
our historical memory and our apprehension of present realities. All these issues are tackled through
a perspective that pushes beyond the boundary between genres, as much as between high and
popular culture. Rushdies scope is geographically as well as historically really far-reaching, as
shown by his early novel Midnights Children (1981).
As emerges from the quoted passage (see reading materials), at the core of Rushdies fiction lies
the notion of individual identity as tightly connected with national and socio-political identity/s: this
is why in the book, the narrators grasp of history and biography starts from an impression of
fragmentation as much as of dispersion (into the other childerns voices). The author and his
narrator Saleem intertwine fiction and romance, storytelling and ordered, realistic narration,
drawing from as different literary forms as the Indian oral saga and folk-tale, the Bildungroman and
the fake autobiography, magic realism, and non-literary genres, such as the Bollywood movies.

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All this enhances the conscious provisionality of any story told in the novel, especially
considering the unreliability of its narrator as he sets out to provide readers with an (his) account
of Indian history since the formation of the modern Indian nation.
Hybridity, interplay, and even a strong stress on orality are some of the devices Rushdie uses to
challenge his audience into a wider understanding of history, even through the ironical appeal to
fiction as fabrication. Though focusing on contemporary society rather than history, many
writers share with him the need to find a common ground where possible implications of a multi-
ethnic social fabric can be explored. This is quite apparent from the literature written by migrant or
immigrant/second- or third-generation immigrant writers, such as Timothy Mo (Sour Sweet, 1982)
or the novelist-playwright Hanif Kureishi (b. 1954;) whose The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) also
plays on the chord of cultural contamination: the protagonist, a Londoner of Indo-Pakistani
descent in his teens is actually caught between his identity as a Englishman born and bred, almost
and the loyalty to and affiliation with his familys culture. Growing up in the feverish and pop
atmosphere of the sixties, the protagonist becomes aware of a number of allegiances which bind
him to both contexts: his friends, his social surroundings, his family past glimpsed through tales
but, also, the life of the burgeoning Anglo-Pakistani community in London. While showing how
class, ethnic belonging and other identities overlap, Kureishi comes to dramatise the allegiances and
divisions of a multi-cultural society in a stimulating way and to dramatic, as well as to comic and
ironic purpose.
British Nations in contemporary fiction
Irony, interplay between registers, concerns with history and urgent aspects of contemporary society
underlie some major works written by British-born writers whose belonging to the de-centred
realities of Ireland, Scotland, Wales (and to some extent Northern England) also pertain to the
perception of a multi-cultural society.
A representative of such de-centred strain, especially after his groundbreaking novel Trainspotting
(1993; source for Danny Boyles film) is Irvine Welsh (b.1958) A writer for film, television and
theatre, Welsh was born in Scotland and his Scotland is in some ways his loved/hated dimension as
a writer, though like other Scottish novelists (James Kelman, Iain Banks, Janice Galloway) his
views are not qualified by regional interests. In the novel, dislocation is not only geographical but
social (covering the question of the working-class): it is actually set in Edinburgh and more
specifically in the forgotten neighbourhood of Leith in the 1980s: the characters openly talk about a
depressed climate brought about by unemployment, lack of opportunities, boredom, which afflict
the new working-class generation. These themes are not exceptional with the period, as they are
also the primary concern of Northern English literature, and cinema of the nineties (think of
directors Ken Loach and Mike Leigh), but Welshs original viewpoint is defined by both his
controversially national concern and by his techniques. Focusing on Scotland, and contrasting the
post-devolution Scottish nationalism, Welsh makes explicit an element of contemporary literature in
Scotland as well as in Ireland and Wales: the keen perception of cultural subjugation to England and
the willingness to disentangle from it. This defines a provocative, and often ambivalent, post-
colonial perspective. The disenfranchisement from England is mostly perceived thought the very

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use of language (Edinburghs Scots as opposed to standard English) where dialect is intertwined
with the characters own idiolect and with a deliberately demotic register. As far as technique is
concerned, the realistic grasp of language is counterpointed by a strain of (black) humour and
hallucinatory distortion which is connected with the drug-addiction theme, but is also a landmark of
Welshs writing, as his following novels will reveal (The Acid House, 1994, Ecstasy: Three Tales of
Chemical Romance, 1996, and Glue, 2001).
The relation to England is one of the threads non-English writers have started to pull since the late
sixties while foregrounding their regional-national belonging and allegiances. The internal situation
of Scotland, Wales and Ireland is now being investigated through a clear focus on the current socio-
political situation. This has emerged for example, in a breed of Irish writers who manage to win not
just national but worldwide acclaim by addressing the delicate issue of Irish politics, from the rising
of the Troubles in the 1960s to the pacification process of the 1990s. A number of works have
emerged, falling at first into a more realistic strain (such as Frank McCourts autobiographical
Angelas Ashes, 1996; later a movie by A. Parker, 1999) then opening up to not just linguistic but
formal experimentation. This often meets the demand for a critical view of history and
historiographical consciousness: it is the case of writers such as Seamus Deane whose Reading into
the Dark (1997) casts a searching light on the events leading to the Troubles. Deane tackles the
political issue by interweaving past and present narratives through a constant interplay of genres,
such as the autobiography, the national/official historiographical narrative, the family saga, and
counterpointing the realistic grasp of stories through elements drawing from the supernatural.
England itself, whether in a post-imperial, Cold War, or post- 9/11 context, is the subject of a
number of British writers who have also been in the spotlight, like Ian McEwan (b. 1948) whose
books have gradually managed to relate the private/individual sense of growing instability and
dislocation to the depiction of a chaotic public/social scenery, where the need to find new
stories of collective identity is urgent. In McEwan, as much as in his contemporaries (the above
mentioned Swift or Barnes, for example) history and society loom large, but the realistic mode is
preferably linked to post-modernist narrative techniques which have been mentioned above. After
dealing with the post-war period and the 1980s, MacEwan has shifted his focus on urgently
contemporary issues, such as the reflection of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the World Trade
Centre in New York on the British scene, haunted by the ghost of fundamentalism since the
attacks in 2004 (in Saturday). But the anxiety over contemporary history is often transferred onto a
re-reading of past history which reveals not only its discontinuity and disruption, but also the utter
complexity of the stories that are spun around it. So Atonement (2001; see the recent movie by Joe
Wright) tackles the subject of pre-war England and of the subsequent conflict by focusing on a
family history: class conflicts are pitted against a wide historical canvas and individuals are
confronted with the need to find out the truth about their past and the story of those who surround
them. Like many fellow novelists, McEwan adopts a thoroughly meta-literary perspective (the
narrator, Briony Tallis, is a writer) and opens up to intertextual perspectives to reinforce the
implications of an unstable balance between fact (in history, in personal or collective memory) and
fiction, which look inevitably inextricable.


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