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Martin Paul Eve

Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London

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This post forms part of my ‘aspects of the novel’ collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subject. They implicitly or explicitly describe a canon not of my own making or choosing and replicate this from various sources. The original encyclopaedia articles are far more comprehensive, nuanced and worth consulting. I am especially conscious, in this article, of the danger of causing offense by grossly simplifying a national history.

At the turn of the twentieth century, publishers moved away from the triple-decker format of three-volume novels that had been prevalent in the preceding century. Genre forms became increasingly segmented and, famously, the Modernist novel, embodied in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), rose to prominence, fuelled by the liberating influence of the New Woman fiction of the late 19th Century, among other determinants.

A key factor determining the path of the novel in the twentieth century was the rise of general literacy due to Victorian educational paradigms. There was, therefore, a much larger market for the novel than ever before. Indeed, social relations were in a state of flux in the early twentieth century and it is partially to the navigation of these revised interpersonal strictures to which the Modernist novel addresses itself. Another element that structured the place of the novel in the twentieth century was the rise of university English, which built and upheld a canon of works within a structure of value.

It is virtually impossible, in a short set of notes such as these, to capture the diversity of novelistic fiction of the British Isles in the twentieth century, so rapidly did it grow. It spans fantasy (JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) and Lord of the Rings (1954-55)) through spy novels (Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and stories) up to postcolonial fictions and retellings (Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), the novels of Salman Rushdie). The novels of Kazuo Ishiguro, also, defy any kind of generic classification. The experimentalism of J. G. Ballard is likewise hard to pigeonhole. Strands of science fiction continue over the course of the century such as in the works of Ian M. Banks. Experimentalism continued through the mid-century, with Samuel Beckett’s trilogy and the emergence of Angela Carter in 1966.

John Marx also notes that twentieth-century novels of the British Isles have a broad diversity of setting, reflecting Britain’s ongoing imperial presence (p. 126). Immigration, signalled by the SS Empire Windrush docking at Tilbury in 1948, brought with it a newly diversified authorship base, such as Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956).

An entire strand of British postmodern fiction can also be identified. John Fowles, Martin Amis, Rushdie, Carter, and Ballard could all be situated within this tradition (see Eve). In turn, these spawned a subsequent generation of contemporary writers indebted to such experimentalist traditions: Will Self, Russell Hoban, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Tom McCarthy, David Mitchell and James Kelman, among others.

Further reading:

  • Eve, Martin Paul, ‘Late Modernism, Postmodernism, and After’, in The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction 1980 - The Present, ed. by Peter Boxall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 137–49 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108649865.008
  • Marx, John, ‘British Isles (20th Century)’, in The Encyclopedia of the Novel, ed. by Peter Melville Logan, Olakunle George, Susan Hegeman, and Efraín Kristal (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 124–34