Abstract
Who will be for the British novel of the 1980s what John Fowles and Margaret Drabble were for the 1960s? Which new novel will capture attention as did The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, as did The Millstone and The Waterfall? The decade has not been lacking in contenders: D. M. Thomas, though, has been unable to maintain the audience and high praise garnered by The White Hotel (1981); Bruce Chatwin’s promise has been lost in an unfortunately early death; Salman Rushdie may have been co-opted and compromised by world politics. Two of the most promising authors, however, have consistently broadened their appeal with each new work, demonstrating astonishing mastery of fictional structures and burking little in their pursuit of complex ideas: Julian Barnes and Graham Swift.1
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Notes
Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979) p. 12
Tom Paulin, ‘National Myths’, Encounter, 54 (June 1980) 63.
Anthony Thwaite, ‘A Course in Creativity’, Observer, 18 April 1982, 31; Bill Greenwell, ‘Flashback’, New Statesman, 103 (16 April 1982) 19
John Mellors, ‘Bull’s Balls’, London Magazine, 22 (April/May 1982) 134.
See Paul D. MacLean, A Triune Concept of the Brain and Behaviour (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973
Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden (New York: Random House, 1977)
See Paul D. MacLean, ‘New Findings Relevant to the Evolution of Psychosexual Functions of the Brain’, Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, 135 (October 1962) 289–301
See The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966) pp. 11-16. The disintegration of this synthesis and the competition of the various types of discourse thus released for authority and validation has become one of the key topics in the discussion of postmodern fiction. See, for example, Jim Collins, Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989) pp. 11–12
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1988)
David Coward, ‘The Rare Creature’s Human Sounds’, Times Literary Supplement, 5 October 1984, p. 1117; Terence Rafferty, ‘Walking the Detectives’, The Nation, 241 (6–13 July 1985), 22
John Updike, ‘A Pair of Parrots’, The New Yorker, 61 (22 July 1985) 86.
See Jeffrey Berman’s insightful The Talking Cure: Literary Representations of Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985)
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© 1991 David Leon Higdon
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Higdon, D.L. (1991). ‘Unconfessed Confessions’: the Narrators of Graham Swift and Julian Barnes. In: Acheson, J. (eds) The British and Irish Novel Since 1960. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21522-5_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21522-5_12
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