The English Novel In History: 1950-1990

"The English Novel In History" describes and analyses the most striking features and developments in British prose fiction since the Second World War. Steven Connor focuses on the characteristic power of the novel's address--its power to project, sustain and diversify its audience.
"The English Novel In History" develops richly particularised analyses of a number of key areas of postwar fiction. Connor discusses works which inherit and adapt the tradition of the "condition of England" novel, both from the inside perspective of British-born writers such as Angus Wilson and Margaret Drabble and the "outside in" perspectives of novelists such as Hanif Kureishi, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie. He examines novels' treatment of history as well as the self-conscious re-writing of the novel's own history, and concludes with an analysis of the complex meditations on the nature of narrative ending offered by such authors as George Orwell and Julian Barnes, posing various kinds of political, economic and military catastrophe in the postmodern world.