BRITISH FICTION AFTER MODERNISM: THE NOVEL AT MID-CENTURY; ED. BY MARINA MACKAY

This collection of essays by leading and emergent critics of twentieth-century fiction offers a wide-ranging and provocative reassessment of the British novel's achievements after modernism. Focusing on mid-century writing, the book identifies continuities of preoccupation - with national identity, historiography and the challenge to literary form presented by public and private violence--that span the entire century. The book offers new readings of such famous figures as Amis, Golding, Greene and Spark, and reappraises the work of brilliant but less familiar contemporaries including Ann Quin, Elizabeth Taylor and Storm Jameson. Front Matter....Pages i-xii Introduction: British Fiction After Modernism....Pages 1-16 Rendering Justice to the Visible World: History, Politics and National Identity in the Novels of Graham Greene....Pages 17-32 The Case for Storm Jameson....Pages 33-41 The Nooks and Crannies of her Being: Howard Spring’s Shabby Tiger and Northern Camp....Pages 42-49 A Plausible Magic: the Novels of Henry Green....Pages 50-58 Varieties of Modernism, Varieties of Incomprehension: Patrick Hamilton and Elizabeth Bowen....Pages 59-76 James Hanley and the Colours of War....Pages 77-87 The Girl on a Swing: Childhood and Writing in the 1940s....Pages 88-98 Ivy Compton-Burnett and Risibility....Pages 99-120 Angus Wilson: No Laughing Matter and No Laughing Matter ....Pages 121-130 Reconsidering Lucky Jim: Kingsley Amis and the Condition of England....Pages 131-144 Olivia Manning and her Masculine Outfit....Pages 145-156 The Cold War Way of Death: Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori....Pages 157-165 The Greater Tragedy Imposed on the Small: Art, Anachrony and the Perils of Bohemia in Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows ....Pages 166-183 From Psychology to Ontology: William Golding’s Later Fiction....Pages 184-202 The British Novel in 1960....Pages 203-211 Back Matter....Pages 212-221 What happened to British fiction after modernism? What sort of thing was the novel at mid-century? This book provides a new literary and historical context for a generation of brilliant writers whose work has been hard to categorize. Arguing that labels such as 'realist' and 'experimental' have failed to do justice to the transitional nature of the mid-century novel, the contributors reveal how writers paid their debts to their modernist predecessors while creating a kind of fiction that was newly sensitive to the 'tired horror', in novelist Elizabeth Taylor's apt phrase, of an age marked by increasing violence and national decline. Bringing together exemplary close readings by academics, writers and critics, British Fiction After Modernism pays a long overdue tribute to those writers who re-shaped the British novel for the postwar generation A collection of essays which offers a reassessment of the British novel's achievements after modernism. Focusing on mid-century writing, this book identifies continuities of preoccupation - with national identity, historiography and the challenge to literary form presented by public and private violence - that span the entire century This collection of essays offers a wide-ranging and provocative reassessment of the British novel's achievements after modernism. The book identifies continuities of preoccupation - with national identity, historiography and the challenge to literary form presented by public and private violence - that span the entire century. This collection of essays offers a wide-ranging reassessment of the British novel's achievements after modernism. Focusing on mid-century writing, it identifies continuities of preoccupation that span the entire century Edited By Marina Mackay And Lyndsey Stonebridge. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 212-217) And Index.