Book contents
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
This is a book that is devoted to the discussion of fiction – reference is made to more than a hundred novelists, and to some two hundred fictional works. I am concerned chiefly with novels, but I also discuss significant works of shorter fiction. My aim has been to produce a history of post-war fiction in Britain that places the literary texts centre stage, and that allows them, rather than a predetermined critical agenda, to reveal the significant patterns and themes in the literary culture. Inevitably, one's own critical perspective is fashioned by a particular intellectual climate, but the withholding, or (at least) the judicious deployment, of favoured critical frameworks is often a necessary part of uncovering the significance of a novel. One needs to bear in mind that the theoretical preoccupations that have become dominant in the academy since 1980 – and that may be overtly alluded to in the work of a Carter, a Rushdie or a Winterson – had no relevance to the novelists of the 1950s and earlier 1960s, whose work unfolded against a very different cultural and intellectual background.
At the beginning of such a project, however, some kind of general framework for reading is required, most especially to explain what is unique to the novel as a form of knowledge, and to help justify the claim, which underpins this work, that the novel in Britain from 1950–2000 yields a special insight into the most important areas of social and cultural history.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002