The 1980s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction

Description

How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 1980s shape contemporary British fiction? Setting the fiction squarely within the context of Conservative politics and questions about culture and national identity, this volume reveals how the decade associated with Thatcherism frames the work of Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis, and Graham Swift, of Scottish novelists and new diasporic writers. How and why 1980s fiction is a response to particular psychological, social and economic pressures is explored in detail. Drawing on the rise of individualism and the birth of neo-liberalism, contributors reflect on the tense relations between 1980s politics and realism, and between elegy and satire. Noting the creation of a ‘heritage industry’ during the decade, the rise of the historical novel is also considered against broader cultural changes. Viewed from the perspective of more recent theorisations of crisis following both 9/11 and the 21st-century financial crash, this study makes sense of why and how writers of the 1980s constructed fictions in response to this decade’s own set of fundamental crises. Cover Contents Series Editors’ Preface Acknowledgements Contributors Critical Introduction Emily Horton, Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson 1 Literary History of the Decade The Bomb, Kidnappings and Yuppies: British Fiction in the 1980s 2 Special Topic 1 The Awakening of Caledonias? Scottish Literature in the 1980s 3 Special Topic 2 The Art of Bad Government: Thatcherism and British Fiction Joseph Brooker 4 Postcolonial and Diasporic Voices ‘Black’ British Women’s Fiction and Literary Institutions in the 1980s 5 Historical Representations The Heritage Industry and Historiographic Metafiction: Historical Representation in the 1980s 6 Generic Discontinuities and Variations Crises of Authority and Innovations in Form and Technique in British Fiction of the 1980s 7 International Contexts (North America) The American Reception of British Fiction in the 1980s 8 International Contexts (Europe) The Romanian Context: Between Realism and Postmodernism Timeline of Works Timeline of National Events Timeline of International Events Biographies of Writers Index