A History of English Literature

Overview

The English novel showed new vigour in the 1980s, from writers old and new.

As fiction flourishes and poetry shrinks, writing and reading are affected by a

marketplace as large as the reach of written English. Reception and production

change with new electronic technologies, making the future of literature in

the third millennium harder to predict. After a look at such global factors,

discussion focuses on the novel’s leading practitioners. The reader of Chapter

15 is invited to turn to the Preface to the Third Edition (p. xviii) for an

explanation of the approach adopted.

nCan a literary medium be global?

The English language, spreading along trade routes in the 18th century, eventually
became the chief language of global business. Having lost their American colonies,
the English, Scots and Irish used English in their rule of India and other parts of the
globe. The language spoken by King Alfred and written by Dr Johnson, is now,
largely thanks to US enterprise, the language of oil, airlines, electronics, computing,
and mass entertainment. Words, in popular entertainment, often matter less than
visual images or music.The mass media make the noise against which literature now
tells its stories.
English is ubiquitous, ‘whether on the shores of Asia or the Edgware Road’ – a line
from T.S.Eliot’s Four Quarte tswhich brackets the exotic with the mundane. It was
on the shores of Asia that the contact language known as Pidgin English developed,
said to be a Cantonese version of ‘business English’. If China is never likely to be
anglophone,UK telephone enquiries about train times have long been answered in
English from call centres in India. English spreads and mutates. In the pidgin of
Papua-New Guinea the period of Australian rule is ‘Time Bilong Massa’. Much inter-
national business is transacted in an English written and read in offices or on
portable devices, a language of text, not of speech.
Languages from the shores of Asia are now spoken alongside English in London

• on,fo r example, the Edgware Road, north of its junction at Marble Arch with
  Oxford Street. The language of Oxford Street, originally the road from London to

401

Contemporaries

15

CHAPTER

Contents

Can a literary medium

be global? 401

Import-export 402

The touch of history 403

Al l literature is

contemporary 404

The dominance of fiction 404

Drama and theatre 404

Theatre and identity 406

Alan Bennett 406

Stage politics 406

Poetr y 407

Contemporary poetry 407

Greatness? 407

Paul Muldoon 408

Popular contemporaries 409

The empire of fiction 409

Fiction and the

university 410

Malcolm Bra dbury,

David Lodge,

Anthony Burgess 410

Metropolitan novelists 411

Ian McEwan 411

Martin Amis 412

Julian Barnes 412

Post-modernism? 414

Some novelists 414

A. S. Byatt 415

Angela Carter 415

Kazuo Ishiguro 415

Graham Swift 417

J. G. Ballard 417

Penelope Fitzgerald 418

Beryl Bainbridge 419

Michael Frayn 420

Pat Barker 421

Looking back 421

Salman Rushdie 422

Penelope Lively 423

‘Post-colonial’? 423

V. S. Naipaul 424

‘Multi-culturalism’ 424

continued overleaf