Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s

Description

The 1970s in Britain saw a series of industrial disputes, a referendum on membership in the European Economic Community, conflict about issues of immigration and citizenship, and emergent environmental and feminist movements. It was also a decade of innovation in the novel, and novelists often addressed the state of the nation directly in their works. In Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s Russell Perkin looks at social novels by John Fowles and Margaret Drabble, the Cold War thrillers of John le Carré, Richard Adams's best-selling fable Watership Down, the popular campus novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge, Doris Lessing's dystopian visions, and V.S. Naipaul's explorations of post-colonial displacement. Many of these highly regarded works sold in large numbers and have enjoyed enduring success – a testament to the power of the political novel to explain a nation to itself. Perkin explores the connections between the novel and politics, situating the works it discusses in the rich context of the history and culture of the decade, from party politics to popular television shows. Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s elucidates a period of literary history now fifty years in the past and offers a balanced perspective on the age, revealing that these works not only represented the politics of the time but played a meaningful role in them. Cover Politics and the British Novel in the1970s Title Copyright Dedication Contents Preface and Acknowledgments Chronology Introduction 1 The Fiction of Discontent: Margaret Drabble’s The Ice Age and John Fowles’s Daniel Martin 2 “England Made Me”: John le Carré’s Karla Trilogy 3 The Green World of Richard Adams 4 The Campus Novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge: Politics in a Small World 5 Doris Lessing’s Feminist Apocalyptic 6 Camels on the Embankment: V.S. Naipaul and the Globalization of the Novel Notes Works Cited Index