Blackwell Reference Online

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In this sea are situated two very large islands, the so-called British Isles, Albion and Ierna, which are greater than any which we have yet mentioned … (pseudo-Aristotle, De mundo c.iv) [P]rose art presumes a deliberate feeling for the historical and social concreteness of living discourse … a feeling for its participation in historical becoming and in social struggle; it deals with discourse that is still warm from that struggle and hostility … (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination ) The subject of this work, the British and Irish novel between the close of World War II and the turn of the millennium, is as vast as it is rich and heterogeneous. This volume concerns novelists of that half-century who are indigenous to Britain or Ireland or who have emigrated to one of these “two very large islands” (usually but not invariably settling in greater London) and who have written novels of acclaim that have significantly engaged with and influenced the indigenous literary culture. Collectively, the essays that follow implicitly (and at points also explicitly) test and explore the meaning of the term “novel” and gauge the pressures on the form brought about by extraliterary developments in the publishing industry, in critical and cultural theory, in film and video, and in literary credentialing (e.g. the rise of the literary prize phenomenon). Whatever we might mean by “novel,” the ideas ... log in or subscribe to read full text