On Modern British Fiction

Mullaney, Julie; Leader, Zachary

doi:10.2307/3739025

Cited by 6 publications

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“…12 Amis, in contrast, has proclaimed that: 'The project is to become an American novelist.' 13 In the post-war decades, then, American writers seemed to represent verve and gusto as opposed to plainness and restraint; they suggested ambitious ways forward from modernism (for McEwan they 'were free of the shadows of modernism, though they had learned all its lessons' 14 ); they were unabashed about grappling with the zeitgeist and what it means to be contemporary; and they exuded the intoxicating gravitas of writing from the centre of power. 'That imperial confidence has now shifted to America', says Amis, 'and you think quite coldbloodedly, quite selfishly, I want some of that.…”

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The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1980–2018

Boxall¹

2019

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In a eulogising essay following the death of John Updike in 2009, Ian McEwan wrote: 'American letters, deprived in recent years of its giants, Bellow and Mailer [and now Updike], is a levelled plain, with one solitary peak guarded by Roth.' 1 Philip Roth would go on to announce his retirement from writing in 2012 and passed away in 2018, thus eradicating the final face from McEwan's literary Mount Rushmore. McEwan's friends and peers, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes, similarly wrote eulogies for Updike; just as McEwan and Christopher Hitchens (another member of their literary set) had done for Saul Bellow in 2005 ('What other American novelist', asked Hitchens, 'has had such a direct and startling influence on non-Americans young enough to be his children?' 2 ), while Amis and McEwan both spoke at Bellow's memorial in New York. Amis also wrote an account of Roth's oeuvre the year after his retirement, 3 and followed this with an appreciation after his death, while McEwan remembered Roth on BBC Radio. 4 Thus, in the early years of the twenty-first century, three of Britain's most acclaimed and criticised novelists -Amis, Barnes and McEwanfound themselves reflecting on the enormous influence of a senior generation of American writers now passed, and were perhaps left wondering where this placed their own generation on the altered literary landscape. Certainly, Zadie Smith, one of the major-voices-to-be of a new twenty-first-century literary generation, regarded Amis, Barnes and McEwan as a collective in its own right: 'Better to cultivate a cipher-like persona, be a featureless squib called Mart, Jules, Ian', writes Smith in her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), suggesting her indebtedness in perhaps the way they would most appreciateironically. 5 Smith was not the first to identify these writers as a group or gang. Since at least the 1980s the media has imagined them as an exclusive all-male group of cronies and sometimes rivals, also including Salman Rushdie and Hitchens among their ranks (both of whom became American citizens), as well as the poets Craig Raine and James Fenton, and more senior figures like Clive James and Ian Hamilton. Many of these writers were first corralled under the stewardship of Hamilton at

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The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1980–2018

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2019

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The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English

Hunter

2007

103

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The short story has become an increasingly important genre since the mid-nineteenth century. Complementing The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story, this book examines the development of the short story in Britain and other English-language literatures. It considers issues of form and style alongside - and often as part of - a broader discussion of publishing history and the cultural contexts in which the short story has flourished and continues to flourish. In its structure the book provides a chronological survey of the form, usefully grouping writers to show the development of the genre over time. Starting with Dickens and Kipling, the chapters cover key authors from the past two centuries and up to the present day. The focus on form, literary history, and cultural context, together with the highlighting of the greatest short stories and their authors, make this a stimulating and informative overview for all students of English literature.

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Movement Fiction and Englishness

Leader¹

2013

The Cambridge Quarterly

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On Modern British Fiction

Cited by 6 publications

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The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1980–2018

The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1980–2018

The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English

Movement Fiction and Englishness

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