A History of English Literature

Shakespearian English. Giuseppe di Lampedusa visited England to see the houses
where its writers had lived, and composed for a young friend a handwritten history
of English literature. William of Baskerville, the detective in Eco’s The Name of the
Rose, is based on the fictional detectives Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown, and on
the philosopher of Nominalism, William of Ockham, born in c.1388 in a hamlet in
Surrey.

The touch of history

The 2007 edition of this book reported income per head in Ireland as being higher
than in England. History then touched the Western credit bubble and rendered this
statistic incorrect. US national debt was already mostly held by China before 11
September 2001. On that day politically radicalized Islamists bombed centres of
power in New York and Washington. They later bombed rush-hour trains in
Madrid and London. Developments less surprising were a further tilt east in the
balance of power; an increased consumption of the world’s resources; controversial
Wester n interventions in Muslim countries. Cultural, political and religious truces
and tolerances are now under strain. The public arena is less a consensus than a
contained dissensus. Sectional interests grow strident. Electronic media change
social life, the nature of text, and the technology, reception and potentialities of
liter ature.
In the massed-together city, the human need for self-representation in story and
drama is satisfied less by language, in speech, in print or on radio, than by visual
imagery in motion. In screen adaptations of classic novels, much of the written
dialogue is cut. The need to make a rapid impact, to sell quickly, alters how books
are written and sold. Big sellers try to grab the reader on page one; but shock and
awe do not last, and ‘literature is news that stays news’ (Ezra Pound).
When this Historywas planned in the early 1990s, the end-point was 1980: a turn-
ing point in the UK, after which Mrs Thatcher’s governments ended the post-war
political consensus that had put full employment and social services before
economic enterprise. A buccaneering capitalism returned; freed markets exposed
old industries to foreign competition. New Labour governments followed suit,
deregulating markets at home, intervening abroad. Hostilities in Northern Ireland
subsided. A rise in affluence continued, and a Chancellor boasted that his policy had
ended ‘boom and bust’. But the banking system would have gone bust in 2007–8, had
it not been bailed out by taxpayers. As Asia industrializes, economic growth is the
aim of the world’s rulers, and the mechanism for this is credit capitalism.

CAN A LITERARY MEDIUM BE GLOBAL? 403

Some novelists from other literatures much read in Britain

Nadine Gordimer (b.1923, South Africa). July’s People (1981). Nobel Laureate, 1991.
Tony Morrison (b.1931, USA). The Bluest Eye (1970), Beloved (1987). Nobel Laureate, 1993.
Margaret Atwood (b.1939, Canada). The Handmaid’s Tale (1986).
Anne Tyler (b.1941, USA).Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1983), The Accidental Tourist
(1985)
J. M. Coetzee (b.1940, South Africa; Australian citizen). Disgrace(1999). Nobel Laureate, 2003
Vikram Seth (b.1952, India), A Suitable Boy (1993), An Equal Music(1999)
Arundati Roy (b.1961, India), The God of Small Things (1997)