[p.

376]
Postscript on the Current
Contents
Internationalization
Overview Postmodernism
Novels
In the last decades of the 20th century, the UK edged closer to Europe and away from the USA.
Contemporaryp poetry
Literature in English became (like the world economy) ever more international.
Further reading
Internationalization
England has become ‘an anglophone culture within an English-speaking world,’ write the editors of the Penguin Book of
Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 (1999); or is it an American-speaking world? By the year 2000, the national
criterion adopted for this History had begun to seem restrictive, when the Americans Toni Morrison and Don DeLillo, the
Russian Joseph Brodsky, the Canadian Margaret Atwood and the Australian Les Murray may have been read and taught in
Britain as much as contemporary Britons such as Tom Stoppard, born in Czechoslovakia (which no longer exists), Kazuo
Ishiguro from Japan, Peter Carey from Australia, Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney from Ireland, or Douglas Dunn from
Scotland - not to mention works in translation, from South America or Italy. This internationalization is partly a market
phenomenon. Or so it seems: the reader should be aware also that contemporary history is made up of currently acceptable
impressions. Even when accurate, it is not scholarship or criticism, but journalism trying to discriminate in a barrage of ‘hype’.
A postscript does not prescribe.
Postmodernism
The much-used term ‘postmodernism’ indicates what came after modernism, but also has a suggestion (like ‘post-Marxist’ or
‘post-structuralist’) that it upstages or supersedes the -ism which it post-dates. Since ‘modern’ means ‘new’, and modernist
literature defined itself chiefly as different from what went before, it had no clear identity. If modernists were ambitious,
reaching towards the universal, whether real or ideal, and towards the grandly historical, postmodernist writing is less
ambitious, settling for less. But the high modernists, Pound, Eliot, Joyce and Lawrence, knew very well that their efforts to
formulate absolutes were inadequate. Postmodernism mistrusts the ambition of these ancestors (as John Fowles did that of the
Victorians), and sometimes claims to be more democratic. But the political analogy is dubious. It
[p. 377]
Novelists from other literatures read in the late 20th century
Nadine Gordimer (1923-) Born in South Africa. July’s Margaret Atwood (1939-) Born in Canada. Feminist poet and
People (1981). (Nobel Laureate, 1991.) novelist. The Edible Woman (1969); Surfacing (1972); Bodily
Tony Morrison (1931-) Born in US. The Bluest Eye (1970), Harm (1982); The Handmaid’s Tale (1986).
Beloved (1987). (Nobel Laureate, 1993.) Vikram Seth (1952-) Born in India. A Suitable Boy (1993),
An Equal Music (1998).

is safer to take ‘postmodernist’ as a label of convenience rather than a term of substance or a movement. Insofar as it has a
definite reference, it may apply to self-consciously experimental writing of the post-1968 period.
Politics are clearer: Britain edged uneasily closer to Europe just as Soviet economic collapse left the US as the world
power, and liberal capitalism as a global model. The policies of the New Labour government of 1997 modified and ratified
Margaret Thatcher’s changes. Gone was the post-war consensus that economics come second to social security and full
employment. Home industries were not protected from foreign competition. Some power was devolved to Wales and Scotland;
extremists in Northern Ireland neared exhaustion. The pattern of social life was increasingly influenced by international
technology, finance and competition; literary culture was modified by the currency of visual and electronic media. For the
mass of people, the human liking for self-representation in story and drama was increasingly satisfied by television or video,
where words are subordinate to images. Playwrights such as Stoppard and Pinter and novelists such as Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
have successfully adapted classic novels for film and television; in such adaptations, 90 per cent of the original dialogue has to
go. The desire for rapid impact began to affect most forms of writing.
Novels Malcolm Bradbury (1932-)
Novelist. Eating People is Wrong
Novels are published, promoted and reviewed, but public agencies also affect the
(1959), Stepping Westward (1965),
reputation and dissemination of literature: University English departments, and
The History Man (1975), Rates of
government bodies such as the Arts Council and the British Council. All for a time
Exchange (1983), Why Come to
supported the campus novel pioneered by Larkin and Amis, and worked by
Slaka? (1986).
Malcolm Bradbury (1932-) and David Lodge (1935-), English professors who
David Lodge (1935-) Novelist.
have read Evelyn Waugh. Campus novels are comic studies of English university
Changing Places (1975), How Far
life in the days before ‘research’ became all-consuming, a world which may soon be
Can You Go? (1980), Small World
as remote as Trollope’s Barchester. Bradbury is farcical, Lodge more systematic.
(1984), Nice Work (1988),
Bradbury’s The History Man is, however, an original and comic-horrific study of
the sociologist Howard Kirk, author of The Defeat of Privacy, for whom the self is a Paradise News (1991).
delusion abolished by Marxism, and the secret of History is to co-operate with it by manipulating others.
Lodge’s most serious novel is How Far Can You Go?, a case study of a group of Catholics living through the changing
morality of the decades before and after the Second Vatican Council. Changing Places is a well-crafted job-exchange between
Philip Swallow of Rummidge (Birmingham), who prides himself on his setting of
[p. 378]
exam questions, and Maurice Zapp of Euphoria State, who plans to be the best-paid English professor in the world. Professor
Lodge has also explained continental literary theory, while reserving his own position; he likes binary structures. Nice Work is
an internal Rummidge exchange, between Dr Robyn Penrose, feminist materialist semiotician, and Vic Wilcox, managing
director of an engineering firm. An older educationalist, Anthony Burgess (1917-93), turned from linguistics to novel-writing
with a Malayan trilogy (1956-9), an Enderby trilogy (1963-74) and the long Earthly Powers (1980). The violence of A
Clockwork Orange (1962) made Burgess famous, but verbal energy is not enough.
There has been perhaps a levelling-out of the realistic novel, which has skilled practitioners whose names are not listed
below. Anita Brookner, Penelope Lively, Penelope Fitzgerald and Susan Hill, for example, write sensitive novels of a familiar
realistic kind, dealing with middle-class private lives. They maintain good writing, as do the broader comic treatments of
current marital or social predicaments by Fay Weldon and Beryl Bainbridge. These topical novels shade into genre fiction,
such as the spy novels of John le Carré and literary biography.
There have been fine literary biographies of Thomas Hardy and George Eliot, and good lives of Keats, Shelley,
Wordsworth and Virginia Woolf, although the best of these, such as the scholarly James Joyce (1959, 1982) by Richard
Ellmann or the stylish Ford Madox Ford (1990) by Alan Judd, are not Boswell’s Johnson. Literary biography seems to
promise a full understanding of another human being, combining the fact of scholarship with the depth of psychology. Fact and
fiction seem to have become closer. Talented writers such as Richard Holmes and Peter Ackroyd have written novelistic
biographies and biographical novels, Holmes of the Romantics, Ackroyd on Nicholas Hawksmoor and Thomas Chatterton.
Ackroyd has also written straight biographies of T. S. Eliot and Sir Thomas More, but his Charles Dickens has inter-chapters
which imagine Dickens’s thoughts, and he has tried to imagine John Milton in America. Susan Hill has recreated the world of
Owen and Sassoon, a vein which has been further reworked by others. This adoption of documentary and historical material, a
source of fiction since the time of Defoe, recurs in recent historical novels about slavery, and, more literally, in a series of
maritime novels by Patrick O’Brian (1972-99). Literary biography offers some of the pleasures of the realist novel.
Notable recent novels
Alastair Gray (1934-) Poor Things (1982). Graham Swift (1949-) Waterland (1983), Last Orders (1996).
A. S. Byatt (1936-) Possession (1990). Angela Carter (1940-92) The Bloody Chamber (1979), Nights
Julian Barnes (1946-) Metroland (1981), Flaubert’s Parrot at the Circus (1984), Wise Children (1991).
(1984). Kasuo Ishiguro (1954-) An Artist of the Floating World
Salman Rushdie (1947-) Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1986), The Remains of the Day (1989).
(1983), The Satanic Verses (1988), The Moor’s Last Sigh Jeannette Winterson (1959-) Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
(1997). (1985).
Ian McEwan (1948-) The Cement Garden (1978), The
Comfort of Strangers (1981).
Peter Ackroyd (1949-) Hawksmoor (1985).
Martin Amis (1949-) Money (1986), London Fields (1989).

[p. 379]
Novelists in the late-20th-century limelight were Angela Carter (1940-92) and Salman Rushdie (1947-), who wrote with
panache about dangerous issues, and Kasuo Ishiguro (1954-), who stalks large subjects with subtlety. Rushdie’s extravagant
prose has a cosmopolitan glitter. Midnight’s Children is a novel or romance of a new type sometimes called historical
fabulism, presenting history via ‘autobiographical’ fantasy. It begins with the narrator’s birth at midnight on 15 August 1947,
when Pakistan and India were born as separate independent states: parturition as partition. Entangled lives of that generation
are made vivid, unfamiliar things perceived with cultural difference.
Rushdie (born in Bombay in 1947, but educated at Rugby School) has adopted magic realism, now an international mode,
in which realist narrative includes episodes of symbolic fantasy. The Satanic Verses, for example, opens with two entwined
characters singing rival songs as they fall from an airliner to land on a snowy British beach unharmed. Similar things are found
in Latin American writing and earlier in the Central European novel, as in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959). ‘Magic
realism’ was a term invented for German expressionism of the late 1920s, traumatic times in which ordinary realism would not
do.
A British upbringing has alienated Rushdie from the religious culture of Islam; the sending of the blasphemous Satanic
Verses to the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran invoked a sentence of death. Former colonies continue to educate Britain in fiction as
in politics. Lively Anglo writing comes from writers such as the Nigerian political exile Wole Soyinka, or from second-
generation immigrants such as Hanif Kureishi. The multicultural nature of current writing in English is increasingly reflected,
on social as well as artistic grounds, in the syllabus at schools and colleges.
An expressionism similar to that of Grass is found in the late poetry of the American Sylvia Plath, and in the sexual
polemics of Angela Carter. Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984) is so zestfully written that its narrative surprises keep its
pornographic affinities under control. The heroine, Fevvers, a gorgeous artiste of the flying trapeze, spent her childhood in a
Whitechapel brothel. After international erotic adventures, it is confirmed that the plumage which enables her to fly is genuine,
for she is a bird as well as a woman. The gender-bending, species-blurring comedy is, like that of

Kazuo Ishiguro (b. 1954).

[p. 380]
Woolf’s Orlando, not all good fun: the frustration Fevvers causes the men she attracts is part of the point. Carter’s influence is
seen in Sexing the Cherry (1989) by Jeannette Winterson, in which the narration erases male/female differences. Her earlier
‘autobiography’ Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), less deliberate, is more original.
Waterland (1983) by Graham Swift is a formidable achievement. A carefully-mounted narrative, it combines fictional
autobiography, family saga and a history of the Fens. Likened to Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and to Hardy for its slow
naturalistic build-up and determined pattern, its doomed rural lives and multiple narration also recall William Faulkner’s As I
Lay Dying. Its highly conscious narrative method is modern rather than Victorian. Swift’s Last Orders is highly praised.
The Remains of the Day (1989) by Kasuo Ishiguro (born in Japan in 1954) is narrated by a retired butler, a man rather
similar to the old Japanese painter who narrates An Artist of the Floating World (1986). In both, an old man remembers a life
in which he has made dubious accommodations with authority in order to retain an honoured role. For both, the radical
revision of perspectives after 1945 is too painful to admit. If the Japanese setting is slightly opaque to outsiders, the English
country house is convincing. The butler’s quaintly dignified language does not hide from us what he has trained himself not to
see: that his admired master was host to pre-war Anglo-German appeasement talks. This finely managed serious comedy
shows clearly how sticking to social roles and rules can lead to self-deception and self-betrayal. Ishiguro draws no attention to
this, nor to his skill. Japanese reticence could be recommended to a Britain where the postmodernist often rings twice.
Contemporary poetry
Contemporary poetry is a small area full of prospectors for gold. Since the humane Elegies for his first wife by Douglas Dunn
(published in 1985), no British collection has imposed itself in the same way.
And I am going home on Saturday
To my house, to sit at my desk of rhymes
Among familiar things of love, that love me.
Down there, over the green and the railway yards,
Across the broad, rain-misted, subtle Tay,
The road home trickles to a house, a door.
She spoke of what I might do ‘afterwards’.
‘Go, somewhere else.’ I went north to Dundee.
Tomorrow I won’t live here any more,
Nor leave alone. My love, say you’ll come with me.
from ‘Leaving Dundee’
Dunn's reticence packs a punch.
The Northern Irishman Paul Muldoon (1951-) and the English James Fenton (1949-) are major figures, and Carol-Ann
Duffy (1955-) seems a major talent now and for the future. Muldoon is a poet of magical imagination and verbal adroitness,
with an oblique economy which dazzles, puzzles and delights, though he can punch when he wants to, simply, as in ‘Blemish’
or ‘Why Brownlee Left’, or eerily, as in ‘Duffy’s Circus’:
[p. 381]
Once Duffy’s Circus had shaken out its tent
In the big field near the Moy Notable poets
John Fuller (1937-)
God might as well have left Ireland
Ian Hamilton (1938-)
And gone up a tree. My father had said so.
Craig Raine (1944-)
... Wendy Cope (1945-)
I had lost my father in the rush and slipped Paul Muldoon (1951-)
Out the back. Now I heard Andrew Motion (1952-)
For the first time that long-drawn-out cry. Sean O’Brien (1952-)
Glyn Maxwell (1962-)
It came from somewhere beyond the corral.
Simon Armitage (1963-)
A dwarf on stilts. Another dwarf.
I sidled past some trucks. From under a freighter
I watched a man sawing a woman in half.
Fenton is highly versatile in a traditional range of prosodic and rhetorical skills, applying an old-fashioned use of metre and
sonority to painfully contemporary subjects, such as Cambodia, where he was a foreign correspondent, and Jerusalem. Duffy’s
powerful gift for ventriloquism is evidenced in ‘Warming her Pearls’:
Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress
bids me wear them, warm them, until evening
when I’ll brush her hair. At six, I place them
round her cool, white throat. All day I think of her ...
Andrew Motion, appointed Poet Laureate in 1999, is a mannerly and accomplished writer. Great claims are made for the
Northerner, Simon Armitage, whose Zoom (1989) retails muscular anecdotes from his experience as a social worker. Seamus
Heaney’s successive volumes make him seem still the poet most worth attending. He has gone on, with The Spirit Level, and in
1999 translated Beowulf, taking English literature back to its origins.
Further reading
Hamilton, I. (ed.). The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). A
well-edited and balanced reference book.
Parker, P. (ed.). The Reader’s Companion to Twentieth-Century Writing (London: Helicon, 1995).
Stringer, J. (ed.). The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Another well-edited and balanced reference book.