Introduction: British Fiction After Modernism

Abstract

One answer to the question raised by this collection — what happened to British fiction after modernism? — might be: not much. The literary gardens of the West, in Cyril Connolly’s frequently quoted phrase, closed in the 1940s: ‘ “Nothing dreadful is ever done with, no bad thing gets better; you can’t be too serious”.’₁ By 1947 writers had little left to push against, let alone experiment with. ‘You don’t think’, Elizabeth Bowen wondered in an exchange with V.S. Pritchett and Graham Greene, ‘you don’t think it possible that things these days may be almost too propitious?’² In the new post-war consensus there was no room for the social and political isolation that had been so crucial, albeit in different ways, for the modernist novel. For a generation who were about to never have had it so good, the omens for a productive literary tension were never so bad. As their island shrank, mid-century writers became more domestic and domesticated. ‘The Novel No Longer Novel, 1945–1960’, was the less than flattering title Malcolm Bradbury gave to his chapter on this period in The Modern British Novel (1993).³ The period covered in the next chapter is so dull it cannot even inspire a literary pun: ‘The Sixties and After: 1960–1979’.