A History of English Literature

I want a hero: an uncommon want,

When every year and month sends forth a new one,

Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,

The age discovers he is not the true one;

The outstanding authors whom the present writer either admires or cannot ignore
are treated in the main text. Undiscussed names and titles are listed in marginal
boxes.
This Historydecided to limit its scope by a national criterion, for reasons set out
in the Introduction (see pp. 4–6). The writers eligible for discussion are English, to
which a few British writers who have altered the course of English literature have
been added. This excludes some writers so widely read in Britain that they might be
supposed to be British. (A reader of the first edition of this book wrote indignantly
to ask how it had excluded Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, an Italian novel, put
into English in 1981.) Foreign writers have, of course, always been read in England:
Latin bibles and Latin writers were read in Britain before there was an English liter-
ature. But the first non-British writing in English to be read widely in England came
in the 19th century, when the American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(1807–1882) was a poet almost as popular as Tennyson. Fenimore Cooper, Melville,
Washington Irving, Walt Whitman and Mark Twain were also popular. From the
1930s,as the USA began to dominate the world’s media, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest
Hemingway, Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers,
Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller were read in England – and
studied. Indeed, Miller’s reputation has lasted longer on this side of the Atlantic. In
the 1960s, novelists such as Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth
and John Updike, and the poet Robert Lowell, were as highly esteemed in the UK as
any native writer. The strictly literary influence of the USA has waned, though it
continues strong in popular culture. But many leading Anglo writers have not been
British: the West Indians V. S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott; Seamus Heaney, an
Ulsterman with an Irish passport, Oxford Professor of Poetry, and succeeded in that
chair by another Ulster-born poet, Paul Muldoon; the Australian Les Murray, winner
of the Queen’s Medal for poetry in 1999. The transatlantic novelists Margaret Atwood
and Toni Morrison have been read enthusiastically in Britain; there has been an Edith
Wharton revival; the South African J. M. Coetzee is highly respected. As the
American commercial empire succeeded the British Empire, writing in English (like
much else in the world economy) is now global. Of the winners of the Nobel Prize
for Literature writing in English, few have been British and fewer English. Other
writing in English will continue to enrich English culture and literature. It comes
from former colonies, from political and cultural exiles in Britain, and from the
descendants of more recent immigrants.
The years of economic difficulty following 1927 saw high modernist examples
ignored more often than assimilated, except by Auden, the major talent to emerge in
Eliot’s shadow. The distinct achievements of the domestic novel were modest and
conservative. English drama remained conservative, and of moderate interest to
literary history. Non-fiction was increasingly dominated by politics.
Though winning the Great War, Britain lost heavily by it. This is shown as much
in the gay Twenties as in the glum Thirties. The post-war slump led to mass unem-
ployment and a General Strike; the Wall Street Crash led to a Labour–Conservative
coalition and the ‘National Government’ of 1929–31. Promises to alleviate social

NON-MODERNISM:THE TWENTIES AND THIRTIES 363

Nobel Prize for

Literature

English-language winners:

1907 Rudyard Kipling

1923 W. B. Yeats

1925 George Bernard Shaw

1930 Sinclair Lewis

1932 John Galsworthy

1936 Eugene O’Neill

1938 Pearl S. Buck

1948 T. S. Eliot

1949 William Faulkner

1950 Bertrand Russell

1953 Sir Winston Churchill

1954 Ernest Hemingway

1962 John Steinbeck

Samuel Beckett

1973 Patrick White

1976 Saul Bellow

1983 Sir William Golding

1986 Wole Soyinka

1991 Nadine Gordimer

1992 Derek Walcott

1993 Toni Morrison

1995 Seamus Heaney

2001 Sir Vidia Naipaul

2003 J. M. Coetzee

2005 Harold Pinter

2007 Doris Lessing