THE BRITISH and IRISH NOVEL SINCE 1960 Also by James Acheson
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THE BRITISH AND IRISH NOVEL SINCE 1960 Also by James Acheson BECKETI'S LATER FICTION AND DRAMA: TEXTS FOR CaMPANY (editor with Kateryna Arthur) BRITISH AND IRISH DRAMA SINCE 1960 The British and Irish Novel Since 1960 Edited by James Acheson Senior Lecturer in English University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand Palgrave Macmillan Editorial matter and selection © James Acheson 1991 Chapter 1 © Judy Little 1991 Chapter 2 © John Fletcher 1991 Chapter 3 © Jocelyn Harris 1991 Chapter 4 © Yasmine Gooneratne 1991 Chapter 5 © Lance St John Butler 1991 Chapter 6 © James Acheson 1991 Chapter 7 © Janet Dunleavy and Rachel Lynch 1991 Chapter 8 © James Gindin 1991 Chapter 9 © Gail Cunningham 1991 Chapter 10 © David Punter 1991 Chapter 11 © Terence Brown 1991 Chapter 12 © David Leon Higdon 1991 Chapter 13 © Bruce King 1991 Softcover reprint of the hardcover lst edition 1991 All rights reserved. For information write: Scholarly and Reference Division St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1991 ISBN 978-1-349-21524-9 ISBN 978-1-349-21522-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21522-5 Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data The British and Irish novel since 1960 / edited by James Acheson. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-312-05778-7 1. English fiction-20th century-History and criticism. 2. English fiction-Irish authors-History and criticism. I. Acheson, James, 1947-. PR881.B723 1991 823'.91409---dc20 90-21835 CIP Contents Preface vii Notes on the Contributors viii 1 Muriel Spark's Grammars of Assent 1 Judy Little 2 Rough Magic and Moral Toughness: Iris Murdoch's 17 Fictional Universe John Fletcher 3 Doris Lessing's Beautiful Impossible Blueprints 32 Jocelyn Harris 4 The Expatriate Experience: the Novels of Ruth 48 Prawer Jhabvala and Paul Scott Yasmine Gooneratne 5 John Fowles and the Fiction of Freedom 62 Lance St John Butler 6 The Small Worlds of Malcolm Bradbury and 78 David Lodge James Acheson 7 Contemporary Irish Women Novelists 93 Janet Egleson Dunleavy and Rachael Lynch 8 The Historical Imagination in William Golding's 109 Later Fiction James Gindin 9 Patchwork and Patterns: the Condition of 126 England in Margaret Drabble's Later Novels Gail Cunningham 10 Essential Imaginings: the Novels of Angela Carter 142 and Russell Hoban David Punter v vi Contents 11 Redeeming the Time: the Novels of John McGahern 159 and John Banville Terence Brown 12 'Unconfessed Confessions': the Narrators of Julian 174 Barnes and Graham Swift David Leon Higdon 13 The New Internationalism: Shlva Naipaul, Salman 192 Rushdie, Buchl Emecheta, Timothy Mo and Kazuo Ishlguro Bruce King Index 212 Preface The thirteen essays in this collection, published here for the first time, survey the work of some of the most major British and Irish novelists of the past thirty years. Featured in it are several writers - Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch and William Golding, amongst others - who established themselves before 1960, and whose work since then has continued to develop in interesting new ways. Most of the essays, however, deal with novelists who have made their appearance since 1960, and who illustrate some of the distinctive characteristics of British and Irish fiction of the last three decades. I am very grateful to the University of Canterbury for making a research grant available to enable me to complete this collection. James Acheson October 1990 vii Notes on the Contributors James Acheson is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He is co-editor of Beckett's LAter Fiction and Drama: Texts for Company, editor of the forthcoming British and Irish Drama Since 1960, and author of two forthcoming books, one on Beckett and the other on John Fowles. He has published essays on Beckett and other modern writers in various edited collections and journals. Terence Brown is Associate Professor of English at Trinity College, Dublin. He is author of Louis MacNeice: Sceptical Vision, Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster and Ireland: a Social and Cultural History, and co-editor of The Irish Short Story, Time Was Away: the World of Louis MacNeice and Tradition and Influence in Anglo-Irish Poetry. His latest book is entitled Ireland's Literature: Selected Essays. Lance St John Butler is Lecturer in English Studies at the Uni versity of Stirling, Scotland. He is author of Thomas Hardy and Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being, editor of Alternative Hardy and Thomas Hardy After Fifty Years (a volume that contains an essay on Hardy by John Fowles), and co-editor of two collections of essays on Beckett: Rethinking Beckett and Make Sense Who May. Gail Cunningham has taught at several universities and col leges in England, including Oxford, Middlesex Polytechnic and the Open University, and is currently Senior Lecturer in Eng lish at Kingston Polytechnic. She is author of The New Woman and the Victorian Novel, and has published numerous essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction. Janet EgIeson Dunleavy is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is author of Design for Writing, George Moore: the Artist's Vision and The Storyteller'S Art, and editor of one of Trollope's Irish novels, Castle Richmond. She is co-editor of George Moore in Perspective, co-author of The Q'Conor Papers, and author of essays on George Moore, Mary Lavin, Elizabeth Bowen, Anthony Trollope, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, and the Irish short story. viii Notes on the Contributors ix John Fletcher is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Univer sity of East Anglia. His books include The Novels of Samuel Beckett, Samuel Beckett's Art, Claude Simon and Fiction Now, Novel and Reader and Alain Robbe-Grillet. He is currently compiling a bibliography of Iris Murdoch. James Gindin is Professor of English at the University of Michigan. He is author of Postwar British Fiction: New Accents and Attitudes, Harvest of a Quiet Eye: the Novel of Compassion, The English Climate: an Excursion into a Biography of John Galsworthy, John Galsworthy's Life and Art: an Alien's Fortress, William Golding, and of numerous essays and reviews. Yasmine Gooneratne is Associate Professor of English and Direc tor of the Post-Colonial Literatures and Language Research Centre at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her published books include Jane Austen, Alexander Pope, Diverse Inheritance: a Personal Perspective on Commonwealth Literature, Silence, Exile and Cunning: the Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and Relative Merits: a Personal Memoir of the Bandaranaike Family of Sri Lanka. She is editor of Stories from Sri Lanka and Poems from India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore. Jocelyn Harris is Associate Professor of English at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, where she teaches courses on the English novel and women's literature. She is author of Samuel Richardson and editor of Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison. Her Jane Austen's Art of Memory is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. David Leon Higdon is Paul Whitfield Hom Professor of English at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. He is General Editor of Conradiana and author of Time and English Fiction and Shadows of the Past in Contemporary British Fiction. Bruce King is former Professor of English at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheva, Israel. He is author of Dryden's Major Plays, Marvell's Allegorical Poetry, The Macmillan History of Seventeenth Century English Literature, New English Literatures and Modern Indian Poetry in English. In addition, Professor King is editor of Dryden's x Notes on the Contributors Mind and Art, Twentieth Century Interpretations of 'All for Love', West Indian Literature, and An Introduction to Nigerian Literature; he is co-editor of the Macmillan Modem Dramatists Series and English Dramatists Series. Judy Little is Professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where she teaches courses on modem literature and women's studies. She is author of Keats as a Narrative Poet and Comedy and the Woman Writer: Woolf, Spark and Feminism, and has contributed essays on women writers to leading journals. Rachael Lynch recently completed her doctoral thesis at Boston University, where she teaches modem Anglo-Irish literature. She is co-author, with Janet Egleson Dunleavy, not only of the essay in this collection, but of an essay on contemporary Irish-American women novelists in The American Novel Since 1960, edited by Melvin J. Friedman. David Punter is Professor and Head of the English Department at Stirling University. He is author of The Literature of Terror: a History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, The Hidden Script: Writing and the Unconscious and An Introduction to Contem porary Cultural Studies. Professor Punter has contributed essays on fiction from the eighteenth century to the present to many leading journals, and has just completed a book entitled The Romantic Unconscious. .