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Contemporary British Fiction 1st Edition Nick Bentley
Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Nick Bentley
ISBN(s): 9780748630370, 0748630376
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 1.06 MB
Year: 2008
Language: english
Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature
Series Editors: Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley
This series provides accessible yet provocative introductions to a wide range of

literatures. The volumes will initiate and deepen the reader’s understanding of
key literary movements, periods and genres, and consider debates that inform
CONTEMPORARY
BRITISH
the past, present and future of literary study. Resources such as glossaries of
key terms and details of archives and internet sites are also provided, making
each volume a comprehensive critical guide.
CONTEMPORARY
FICTION
Bentley
BRITISH FICTION
Nick Bentley
Edinburgh Critical Guides

This critical guide introduces major novelists and themes in British fiction from
Edinburgh Critical Guides
CONTEMPORARY BRITISH FICTION

1975 to 2005. It engages with concepts such as postmodernism, feminism,
gender and the postcolonial, and examines the place of fiction within broader
debates in contemporary culture.
Nick Bentley
A comprehensive Introduction provides a historical context for the study of
contemporary British fiction by detailing significant social, political and cultural
events. This is followed by five chapters organised around the core themes:
Narrative Forms; Contemporary Ethnicities; Gender and Sexuality; History;
Memory and Writing; and Narratives of Cultural Space.
Key Features
• Introduces the major themes and trends in British fiction over the last 30 years
• Analyses a range of writers and texts including Brick Lane by Monica Ali,
London Fields by Martin Amis, The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter,
Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby, The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi,
Atonement by Ian McEwan, Shame by Salman Rushdie, Downriver by Iain
Sinclair, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by
Jeanette Winterson
• Presents a variety of critical and cultural perspectives essential for studying
contemporary British fiction
• Provides essential resources for further reading and research
Nick Bentley is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature at Keele University. He

is the author of Radical Fictions: The British Novel in the 1950s (2007) and editor
of British Fiction of the 1990s (2005).
Edinburgh University Press

Edinburgh
22 George Square
Edinburgh EH8 9LF
www.euppublishing.com
ISBN 978 0 7486 2420 1
Cover design: Michael Chatfield
Pantone 320
Contemporary British Fiction
Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature
Series Editors: Martin Halliwell, University of Leicester and
Andy Mousley, De Montfort University
Published Titles:
Gothic Literature, Andrew Smith
Canadian Literature, Faye Hammill
Women’s Poetry, Jo Gill
Contemporary American Drama, Annette J. Saddik
Shakespeare, Gabriel Egan
Asian American Literature, Bella Adams
Children’s Literature, M. O. Grenby
Contemporary British Fiction, Nick Bentley
Renaissance Literature, Siobhan Keenan
Forthcoming Titles in the Series:

Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature, Hamish Mathison
Contemporary American Fiction, David Brauner
Victorian Literature, David Amigoni
Crime Fiction, Stacy Gillis
Modern American Literature, Catherine Morley
Scottish Literature, Gerard Carruthers
Modernist Literature, Rachel Potter
Medieval Literature, Pamela King
Women’s Fiction, Sarah Sceats
African American Literature, Jennifer Terry
Contemporary British Drama, David Lane
Contemporary Poetry, Nerys Williams
Contemporary British
Fiction
Nick Bentley
Edinburgh University Press

For Karla
© Nick Bentley, 2008
Edinburgh University Press Ltd

22 George Square, Edinburgh
Typeset in 11.5/13 Monotype Ehrhardt

by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wilts
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 2419 5 (hardback)

ISBN 978 0 7486 2420 1 (paperback)
The right of Nick Bentley

to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Contents
Series Preface vii

Acknowledgements viii
Chronology ix
Introduction
Historical and Theoretical Contexts 1975–2005 1
Politics 4
Class 8
Gender and Sexuality 11
Postcolonialism, Multiculturalism
and National Identity 16
Youth and Subcultures 21
A Note on Theory 24
Chapter 1 Narrative Forms:

Postmodernism and Realism 30
Martin Amis, London Fields (1989) 35
Alasdair Gray, Poor Things (1992) 44
Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000) 52
Chapter 2 Writing Contemporary Ethnicities 65

Salman Rushdie, Shame (1983) 66
Courttia Newland, Society Within (1999) 75
Monica Ali, Brick Lane (2003) 83
vi contents
Chapter 3 Gender and Sexuality 96

Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve (1977) 97
Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) 108
Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch (1992) 117
Chapter 4 History, Memory and Writing 128

Graham Swift, Waterland (1983) 131
A. S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance (1990) 140
Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001) 148
Chapter 5 Narratives of Cultural Space 160

Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) 161
Iain Sinclair, Downriver (1991) 172
Julian Barnes, England, England (1998) 180
Conclusion 192
Student Resources 198

Internet Resources 198
Questions for Discussion 199
Alternative Primary Texts 202
Glossary 205
Guide to Further Reading 214
Index 239
Series Preface
The study of English literature in the early twenty-first century is

host to an exhilarating range of critical approaches, theories and
historical perspectives. ‘English’ ranges from traditional modes of
study such as Shakespeare and Romanticism to popular interest in
national and area literatures such as the United States, Ireland and
the Caribbean. The subject also spans a diverse array of genres from
tragedy to cyberpunk, incorporates such hybrid fields of study as
Asian American literature, Black British literature, creative writing
and literary adaptations, and remains eclectic in its methodology.
Such diversity is cause for both celebration and consternation.
English is varied enough to promise enrichment and enjoyment for
all kinds of readers and to challenge preconceptions about what the
study of literature might involve. But how are readers to navigate
their way through such literary and cultural diversity? And how are
students to make sense of the various literary categories and peri-
odisations, such as modernism and the Renaissance, or the prolif-
erating theories of literature, from feminism and marxism to queer
theory and eco-criticism? The Edinburgh Critical Guides to
Literature series reflects the challenges and pluralities of English
today, but at the same time it offers readers clear and accessible
routes through the texts, contexts, genres, historical periods and
debates within the subject.
Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Andy Mousley and Martin Halliwell for their
helpful editorial advice and their patience, and Jackie Jones, Máiréad
McElligott and James Dale at Edinburgh University Press. Thanks
to Keele University for allowing me a period of research leave, which
was partly used in writing the book. I would also like to thank several
of my colleagues with whom I have taught and had many stimulating
and informative discussions on texts and issues relevant to this book,
including Bella Adams, David Amigoni, Steven Barfield, Annika
Bautz, Fred Botting, Robert Duggan, Scott McCracken, Roger
Pooley, Amber Regis, Sharon Ruston, Helen Stoddart, Barry Taylor,
Philip Tew and Kate Walchester. I would also like to thank Karla
Smith for proofreading the book and the discussions we have had on
its subject matter.
Teaching contemporary British fiction has shaped my thinking
about the subject over the last few years, and I would like to thank the
many students I have had the privilege to work with at Birmingham
University, the Open University, Wedgwood Memorial College and,
especially, Keele University.
Some of the material in this book has appeared in different form
in academic journals. Reworked versions of sections of Chapters 1
and 5 have appeared in Textual Practice, and of Chapter 5 in
Postgraduate English. Thanks to the editors at both these journals
for giving permission for this material to be represented here.
Finally, I would like to thank my family for the continued love and
support they have given me throughout the writing of this book.
Chronology
Date Historical and Cultural Publication of Novels

Events
1975 Margaret Thatcher becomes David Lodge, Changing
Conservative Party Leader; Places; Sam Selvon,
Sex Discrimination Bill Moses Ascending
1976 James Callaghan takes over Emma Tennant, Hotel
from Harold Wilson as de Dream
Prime Minister; Race
Relations Act; Notting Hill
riots; punk rock begins in
Britain
1977 Silver Jubilee of Elizabeth II Angela Carter, The
Passion of New Eve;
John Fowles, Daniel
Martin
1978 New Wave influences British Beryl Bainbridge, Young
Rock and Pop Adolf; A. S. Byatt, The
Virgin in the Garden; Ian
McEwan, The Cement
Garden
x chronology

Events
1979 ‘Winter of Discontent’; Angela Carter, The Bloody

Margaret Thatcher elected Chamber; John Le Carré,
as Conservative Smiley’s People
Prime Minister
1980 Riots in Bristol; Ronald Graham Swift, The
Reagan elected President Sweet Shop Owner
of US
1981 British Nationality Bill; Alasdair Gray, Lanark;
riots in Birmingham, Salman Rushdie,
Bristol, Liverpool, Midnight’s Children;
London, and Manchester Graham Swift, Shuttlecock
1982 The Falklands War between Pat Barker, Union Street
Britain and Argentina
1983 Conservatives re-elected; Salman Rushdie, Shame;
Neil Kinnock takes over Graham Swift, Waterland;
leadership of the Labour Fay Weldon, The Lives
Party from Michael Foot and Loves of a She Devil
1984 The Miner’s Strike; IRA Martin Amis, Money:
bombing of Conservative A Suicide Note;
Party Conference in J. G. Ballard, Empire
Brighton of the Sun; Julian Barnes,
Flaubert’s Parrot; Angela
Carter, Nights at the
Circus; Alasdair Gray,
1982 Janine
1985 Riots in London and Peter Ackroyd,
Birmingham Hawksmoor; A. S. Byatt,
Still Life; John Fowles, A
Maggot; Doris Lessing,
The Good Terrorist;
Jeanette Winterson,
Oranges Are Not the
Only Fruit
chronology xi

Events
1986 Wapping Print Workers’ Kingsley Amis, The Old

Strike Devils
1987 Conservatives re-elected; V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma

‘Black Monday’ – Stock of Arrival; Ian McEwan,
Market Crash; storms cause The Child in Time;
heavy damage across Britain Jeanette Winterson, The
Passion
1988 Reform of the Education Doris Lessing, The Fifth

System; rave culture – Child; Salman Rushdie,
Summer of Love The Satanic Verses
1989 The Fall of the Berlin Wall; Martin Amis, London

revolutions in Eastern Fields; Julian Barnes,
Europe; end of the Cold A History of the World
War; ‘Poll Tax’ in Scotland; in 101⁄2 Chapters;
fatwa issued against Salman Janice Galloway, The Trick
Rushdie is to Keep Breathing;
Kazuo Ishiguro, The
Remains of the Day;
Jeanette Winterson,
Sexing the Cherry
1990 ‘Poll Tax’ in England and A. S. Byatt, Possession: A

Wales; ‘Poll Tax’ riots in Romance; Hanif Kureishi,
London; John Major takes The Buddha of Suburbia
over as Conservative
Leader; President Mandela
released from prison
in South Africa; human
gene experimentation
began
xii chronology

Events
1991 ‘First’ Gulf War; end of Martin Amis, Time’s

apartheid in South Africa Arrow; Pat Barker,
Regeneration; Angela
Carter, Wise Children;
Caryl Phillips, Cambridge;
Jane Rogers, Mr Wroe’s
Virgins; Iain Sinclair,
Downriver
1992 Conservatives re-elected; Alasdair Gray, Poor
Major’s government forced Things; Nick Hornby,
to devalue the pound Fever Pitch; Ian McEwan,
Black Dogs; Adam
Thorpe, Ulverton;
Jeanette Winterson,
Written on the Body
1993 Stephen Lawrence murder; Pat Barker, The Eye in the
Bill Clinton elected Door; Irvine Welsh,
President of US Trainspotting
1994 Tony Blair becomes Leader Jonathan Coe, What a
of the Labour Party; Carve Up!; James
Church of England ordains Kelman, How Late it Was,
first women priests How Late; A. L. Kennedy,
Now That You’re Back;
Iain Sinclair, Radon
Daughters
1995 Britpop at its height Martin Amis, The
Information; Pat Barker,
The Ghost Road; Helen
Fielding, Bridget Jones’s
Diary; Nick Hornby,
High Fidelity; Hanif
Kureishi, The Black
Album; Salman Rushdie,
The Moor’s Last Sigh
chronology xiii

Events
1996 IRA bombs in London Beryl Bainbridge, Every
Docklands and Man for Himself; A. S.
Manchester Byatt, Babel Tower;
Seamus Deane, Reading in
the Dark: A Novel; John
King, The Football
Factory; Graham Swift,
Last Orders
1997 Tony Blair elected as Labour Bernard MacLaverty,
Prime Minister; death of Grace Notes
Princess Diana; the
devolution process for
Scotland and Wales begins
1998 Northern Ireland Peace Julian Barnes, England,
Agreement England; Alan Hollinghurst,
The Swimming Pool
Library; Ian McEwan,
Amsterdam; Courttia
Newland, The Scholar
1999 NATO military involvement Courttia Newland, Society
in the War in Yugoslavia Within
2000 George W. Bush elected Kazuo Ishiguro, When We
President of US Were Orphans; Will Self,
How the Dead Live; Zadie
Smith, White Teeth;
Jeanette Winterson,
The.PowerBook
2001 Labour re-elected; riots in Jonathan Coe, The Rotters’
Oldham, Bradford, Leeds Club; Niall Griffiths,
and Burnley; 11 Sheepshagger; Nick
September attacks on the Hornby, How To Be Good;
World Trade Center in New Ian McEwan, Atonement;
York and the Pentagon Iain Sinclair, Landor’s
Tower; Ali Smith, Hotel
World
xiv chronology

Events
2002 US and British troops invade Will Self, Dorian; Sarah

Afghanistan Waters, Fingersmith
2003 Invasion of Iraq by US Martin Amis, Yellow Dog;
and British troops; Saddam Monica Ali, Brick Lane;
Hussein’s regime toppled; J. G. Ballard, Millennium
troops remain in Iraq People
2004 Civil Partnership Act Jonathan Coe, The Closed
Circle; Alan Hollinghurst,
The Line of Beauty;
Andrea Levy, Small
Island; David Mitchell,
Cloud Atlas; Iain Sinclair,
Dining on Stones
2005 7 July bomb attacks on Julian Barnes, Arthur and
London’s transport George; Diana Evans, 26a;
system Ian McEwan, Saturday;
Salman Rushdie, Shalimar
the Clown; Zadie Smith,
On Beauty
2006 Monica Ali, Alentejo Blue;
J. G. Ballard, Kingdom
Come; Will Self, The Book
of Dave
2007 Gordon Brown takes over Ian McEwan, On Chesil
from Tony Blair as Prime Beach
Minister
Introduction
HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL CONTEXTS 1975‒2005
his book is an introduction to British fiction written in the last

T thirty years or so and is aimed primarily at readers who are
studying the subject or have a general interest in the area. Each of the
sections takes a particular theme or trend identifiable in the period,
and each chapter selects three novels that explore some aspect of that
theme. I have worked with the assumption that readers will have
already read the novels discussed in each chapter. As with most books
of this type, it is not expected to be read cover to cover, and chapters
and sections can be read independently. There is inevitably an
amount of overlap and because of the range of issues they discuss
some of the novels could have been included in different chapters.
Before proceeding, the category of contemporary fiction needs to
be clarified both with respect to this book and the wider under-
standing of the term in literary studies. What do we mean when we
describe certain literature as contemporary? In one sense the very
idea of the contemporary in literature is problematic in that the
term in common usage refers to the immediate present, and once a
book is published it inevitably becomes part of a literary history. In
this book, contemporary refers to the period 1975–2005. The first
date is chosen for reasons that will be explained in a moment, the
latter date is simply related to the year in which the latest references
to fiction appear. The fact that this period of literary history tends
2 contemporary british fiction
to be called ‘contemporary’ has to do with the way in which litera-

ture is periodized generally in literary studies. Until fairly recently,
literature of the second half of the twentieth century tended to be
called post-war literature, referring to the Second World War as the
starting point for this literary-historical category. There are a
number of problems with this nomenclature, one of which is that
there have now been a number of wars in which Britain has been
involved. Secondly, the period is becoming too large for the post-
war categorization to be useful. It seems to make more sense now to
split this category into an earlier and later period.
Contemporary fiction, then, tends to be defined as the period
from the mid-1970s to the present. This is somewhat of an arbitrary
division, but has precedents in a number of recent books.1 The main
factor in choosing 1975 is that it is the year that saw the election
of Margaret Thatcher as the leader of the Conservative Party
and marks a key moment of transition in the politics of Britain, and
by extension the social, economic and cultural climate. From the
end of the Second World War, a politics of consensus was estab-
lished in Britain whereby an unwritten cross-party agreement
accepted the basic systems of the government, such as the welfare
state and a mixed economy of state owned and private industry.
This represented a balance of socialist and capitalist policies that
was based broadly on the economic theories of John Maynard
Keynes.2 Thatcherite monetarist policies, which aimed to disman-
tle the framework of state owned industry, to break the power of the
Trades Unions and to significantly reform the main bodies of the
Welfare State, effectively ended this consensus and signalled a
period in which British politics became an ideological stand-off
between clearly demarcated Left and Right wings. In hindsight,
then, the mid-to-late seventies heralded a period of political, social
and cultural change that divides some of the fundamental charac-
teristics of contemporary Britain from the end of the Second World
War onwards. The novel is traditionally a form of literature that has
responded symbiotically with social and political movements and
fiction in the contemporary period has continued in that vein.
Another problem concerning the coverage of this book is how to
define the term British, or rather how to decide which writers have
been or want to be labelled with a national tag that in some sense
introduction 3
determines the way in which their work is read. Salman Rushdie,

for example, was born in India, moved to Pakistan at a young age
then moved to Britain, and at the time of writing lives in New York.
It is somewhat problematic, therefore, to call him straightforwardly
British. He has, however, most often been categorized in those
terms and even though the novel discussed in depth in this book is
mainly set in Pakistan it does not seem unreasonable to include him
in a book about recent British fiction. The decision of which
writers and which of their novels to include was a difficult one, but
generally I have tried to offer a representative range by choosing
texts that are recognized as being part of an emerging canon of
contemporary British fiction. I have not included writers from the
Republic of Ireland – contemporary Irish literature warrants a
book in its own right – despite many Irish novelists, such as John
Banville, having a direct relationship with contexts and themes in
British writing.
One of the target readerships for this book is students of litera-
ture in higher education studying courses in contemporary fiction,
so I have tried to include several writers that tend to be found on uni-
versity and college syllabuses. I have, however, tried to cover some
less canonical writers such as Courttia Newland and, to a certain
extent, Iain Sinclair.3 The issue of canonicity will be addressed in
the conclusion, and the particular difficulties associated with iden-
tifying a canon of contemporary British fiction, given that the range
of novels being produced in this field is, by definition, continually
increasing. In the Student Resources section at the end of the book
I have included a list of further recommended fiction that fits well
with the main themes of each chapter. This list is not meant to be
exhaustive, but offers a good representation of other novels that
address similar themes to the ones analyzed.
Before moving on to discuss individual writers and novels, it
would be useful to have a sense of some of the important contexts
informing them. In what follows I give a brief overview of some of
these over the last thirty years (and where relevant longer), and
provide some examples of their influence in the fiction of the
period. This is divided into five sections: (1) Politics; (2) Class; (3)
Gender and Sexuality; (4) Postcolonialism, Multiculturalism and
National Identity; and (5) Youth and Subcultures.
POLITICS
If we take a long view of the political history of Britain from the mid
seventies to the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first
century then it is a story of the move from a politics of ideological
opposition to one of broad consensus between the major political
parties. In the winter of 1978–79, the Labour government faced a
series of industrial relations crises that saw some of the bigger
Trade Unions campaigning for higher wage deals. The so-called
‘winter of discontent’ resulted in power cuts, rubbish piling up on
London streets and a serious rift between British labour and those
who had traditionally represented their interests in parliament.
This stand-off continued to dog Left wing and Labour politics until
the mid-1990s.
It was partly due to the turmoil on the Left of British politics that
Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government gained power in
the 1979 general election. This heralded a series of economic and
social policies that radically challenged some of the foundations of
the British system as it had been established by the first Labour gov-
ernment in the period after the end of the Second World War. The
development of Thatcherism rested fundamentally on policies that
shifted responsibility for social welfare from the state to the indi-
vidual. On the surface Thatcherism produced an ideology of indi-
vidual success and the accumulation of wealth. Thatcher famously
stated in an interview with Woman’s Own magazine that ‘There is
no such thing as society’, and this off-the-cuff remark came to rep-
resent the focus on individualism at the heart of Thatcherism.4
State services such as the National Health Service became the
targets for so-called rationalization, which in practice meant the
loss of many jobs and the imposition of management teams charged
with the job of cutting down the national health bill as much as pos-
sible. As part of this outlook Britain was stripped of its nationalized
assets in a series of sell-offs of companies such as British Rail,
British Telecom, British Gas and British Petroleum, which saw
similar ‘rationalizations’, and the accumulation of large profits by
some of those who bought up the under-priced shares.
Culturally, these policies revealed new fears of the two
nations idea of Britain. On the one hand there was a rise in the
introduction 5
unembarrassed spectacle of conspicuous consumption in certain

quarters that saw the rise of the so-called Yuppies (young and
upwardly mobile). Equally it saw a high rise in unemployment due
especially to the shift from older primary industries such as coal, steel
and shipbuilding. This led to the development of an impoverished
working class, and consequently to the development of resistance
movements amongst many sections of the population that were
excluded from, or refused to buy into, the new culture of individual-
ism. The lack of a viable political opposition to the Tories, meant that
popular political movements such as the Miner’s Strike and the
Campaign against the Poll Tax took to the streets, often ending in
scenes of violence where a police force began to take on the look of a
government-led militia. In 1981 in particular, there were a series of
spontaneous riots in some of the underprivileged inner city areas of
Britain who took the brunt of the economic policies pursued by
Thatcherism, and often fuelled by claims of racist intimidation by
the police. Such riots were seen in St. Paul’s in Bristol in 1980,
Chapeltown in Leeds, Handsworth in Birmingham, Toxteth in
Liverpool, Moss Side in Manchester and Brixton in London. Part of
the Thatcherite agenda was to break the power of the Unions, who
some felt were holding British companies to ransom with the threat
of industrial action for increasing pay rises. This policy culminated
in the bitter Miner’s Strike of 1984–85, in which the National Union
of Mineworkers led by Arthur Scargill attempted to challenge the
attempt by the Conservatives to close several collieries. The striking
miners were eventually defeated by the overwhelming forces of the
state resulting in the decimation of many mining communities, espe-
cially in Wales and the north of England.
The ideological entrenchment of the 1980s gradually gave way
to a form of consensus politics in the mid to late 1990s, mainly due
to the reform of the Labour Party led initially by Neil Kinnock and
continued by John Smith and Tony Blair which resulted in
‘New Labour’, a reworking of the party that claimed to hold on to
traditional Labour values, whilst at the same time accepting many
of the policies that the Tories had introduced in the 1980s. The
resulting victory of Labour in the 1997 election under Blair meant
that British politics had, as perhaps always, been fought out on
the issue of which party most successfully presented itself as
representing the centre ground. Culturally, however, there was a

marked shift in the late 1990s where conspicuous consumption
came to be viewed as somewhat passé and a new politics of con-
science, often centred on environmental issues, began to replace the
left-wing politics of the previous generation (not to say that those
groups disappeared or that the economic problems that they were
reacting against went away).
These political issues have been addressed in differing ways by
contemporary novelists. Iain Sinclair, for example, has continued to
produce fiction that is critical of the Thatcher government’s poli-
cies. Jonathan Coe has been critical of both Thatcherism in his
What a Carve Up! (1994) and New Labour in his 2004 novel
The Closed Circle which includes a cameo of Tony Blair. Alan
Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004) includes the other major
political figure of the period; in one scene Margaret Thatcher
appears at a party and dances with the novel’s main character.
Hollinghurst is more ambivalent in his treatment of Thatcher, nev-
ertheless the narrative details the personal consequences of the kind
of excess and lack of social responsibility her policies caused, a
similar approach to that taken by Will Self in his novel Dorian
(2002), set mainly in the 1980s.
One of the successes of the New Labour government was to
begin the peace process in Northern Ireland, a situation that had
dogged British politics since the end of the 1960s. The history of
Northern Ireland over the past four decades is complex and has
seen the most conspicuous acts of violence from both sides of the
dispute on mainland Britain since, arguably, the Civil War. Certain
notable events stand out and have been addressed in some of the
fiction of the period. On Sunday, 30 January 1972, the British Army
opened fire on a mostly peaceful demonstration of Irish Catholics
in the Bogside area of Derry, resulting in the death of fourteen
people. Bloody Sunday, as it came to be known, marked a transition
in the relations between Irish Republicans and the British govern-
ment and saw an escalation of violence by paramilitaries on both
sides of the sectarian divide. The extension of the IRA’s campaign
to Britain in the mid-1970s resulted in several high profile bomb-
ings including the Birmingham pub bombings in 1974. In Jonathan
Coe’s novel The Rotters’ Club (2001) two of the characters are
introduction 7
present in ‘The Tavern in the Town’, one of the pubs targeted,

when the bomb goes off, and Coe evokes the sense of outrage the
event caused in Birmingham at the time, as well as the backlash
against innocent Irish people then settled in England. The
‘Troubles’, as they came to be known, were effectively halted by the
Irish Peace Process, ushered in by Blair’s newly elected Labour gov-
ernment after 1997. This was part of a broader policy of devolution
that saw the creation of the Welsh assembly and the Scottish par-
liament in the late 1990s, which although only having certain
powers have formed a focus for debate on the issue of national iden-
tity amongst the separate countries of the United Kingdom. In
Northern Ireland, the main literary response to the Troubles has
been in drama, although the novels of Seamus Deane and Bernard
MacLaverty are notable exceptions.5 There has been a renaissance
in Scottish writing in the last forty years or so with such notable
figures as Janice Galloway, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, A. L.
Kennedy, Ali Smith, Alan Warner and Irvine Welsh.
There have been a number of key international events that have
impacted on Britain over the last thirty years and have been used as
source material for British writers. At the beginning of the period
the ongoing Cold War between communism and capitalism led to
the amassing of armaments by the Soviet Union and the US-led
Western Powers. The anxieties caused cast a significant shadow
over British culture, often articulated as fear for an impending,
nuclear Third World War. This has formed a significant topic in
fiction by writers such as Martin Amis, J. G. Ballard and Graham
Swift, and most notably in the spy novel series produced by John le
Carré.6 The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, followed by the series of
revolutions across Eastern Europe, effectively ended the Cold War.
Again a number of novels have used these events as a backdrop. Ian
McEwan’s novel Black Dogs (1992), for example, takes the fall of the
Berlin Wall as the starting point for an exploration of violence that
goes back to the Second World War, and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth
(2000), a novel that maps the impact of certain key events during
the period, has a passage that describes the mixed reaction by a
number of characters to the events in Berlin in 1989.7
Perhaps the most significant event of the last thirty years or so, in
terms of its consequences, was the attack on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 and such a historic event was
bound to find itself addressed in fiction written after that event. In
Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), the event is observed on television by
the main character, and the novel describes the impact it has on the
multiethnic area in which the main character lives in East London.8
Ian McEwan in his 2005 novel Saturday, uses the context of 9/11 in
the observation early in the novel of an airliner on fire flying over
London: ‘Everyone agrees, airliners look different in the sky these
days, predatory or doomed’.9 The context of terrorism and the polit-
ical and ethical questions it raises is also a key feature in J. G. Ballard’s
novels Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006).10 The
consequences of 9/11 are still being played out in Afghanistan, Iraq
and in acts of terrorism in Britain and other parts of the world, and it
is likely that these will continue to produce subject matter for much
fiction produced in Britain in the coming years.
CLASS
The ideological divisions of the 1980s and early 1990s represented by

the political differences of the Labour and Conservative Parties were
primarily based on issues of social class. The Labour Party, since its
origins at the turn of the twentieth century, had traditionally strove
to represent the interests of the British working class; whilst the
Conservatives had developed in their long history from being the
party of the landed aristocracy to being increasingly appealing to
the middle classes (especially since the decline of the Liberal Party
from the end of the First World War onwards). That is not to say,
however, that class has always determined voting patterns. Not all
eligible working-class voters necessarily support the Labour Party;
the electoral successes of the Tories in 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992
relied, in part, on a significant amount of support amongst the working
class. Similarly, a large section of the middle classes, especially intel-
lectuals, creative artists and professionals have tended to support
left-wing political causes throughout the period.
This leads to one of the problems with the terms of definition in
which class has traditionally been understood. The division of
society into the three broad economic classes of working, middle
introduction 9
and upper relies heavily on social and economic theories developed

by those on the Left, and in particular those influenced by Marxist
theory (although Marx tended to identify just two classes: the
ruling class and the proletariat, the former being an amalgamation
of middle and upper classes). In Britain, these clear class divisions
owed much to the legacy of the social problems of the 1930s
imported into the very different world that began to emerge after
the Second World War. The categorization of such a complex beast
as the nature of social division is fraught with problems. There have
been more recent attempts to offer classification of social groups in
terms of economic wealth such as Thompson and Hickey’s five
level class model, however, this still retains an element of simplify-
ing the situation.11 Nevertheless, it is still useful, in certain circum-
stances, to identify social groups in terms of class, if only because it
makes it easier to develop a sense of class consciousness from which
political resistance movements may be formed.
One other problem with class as a system by which to categorize
people, and one that is particularly relevant to the role of literature
and fiction in society, is the shift that occurred in some quarters in
the 1950s about the way class was understood. This shift, broadly
speaking, involved a rethinking of class in cultural rather than eco-
nomic terms. This process was led in Britain by cultural critics
and writers such as Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, E. P.
Thompson and Stuart Hall, and resulted in the emergence of what
came to be known in universities as Cultural Studies. One of the
premises behind this movement was that class could be identified as
a cultural phenomenon, rather than purely along economic lines.
Pioneering work by Hoggart on the cultural pursuits of the working
class served to redefine the term itself, and similarly by Williams on
literature and Thompson with respect to political and cultural move-
ments historically.12
This shift has problematized the way in which class has been
understood in the last forty years or so. For example, identifiable
cultural pursuits and practices of the working class in the 1950s and
into the 1960s such as popular music, film and television, football
and ‘pub’ culture can hardly be claimed now as the pursuits of this
section of society alone. The immense cultural shifts that have
taken place since the fifties mean that the old categories of class are
far more difficult to identify. This is not to say that the differences
in wealth between the richest and poorest elements do not continue
to have a significant effect on the way British society is organized,
and the way people are represented in cultural terms. The recent
media invention of the so-called ‘chavs’ is based on older class prej-
udices recycled in a new form that allows it to circulate in society
without the charge of classism that it clearly relies on.
One recurring theme throughout the period from the 1950s
onwards is the claim that Britain is becoming (or has become) a
classless society. A series of Prime Ministers from both the major
parties have made this claim from Macmillan in the 1950s, Thatcher
in the 1980s through to Major and Blair in the 1990s and into the
new century. This tends to be a political move that in some way bol-
sters the justification of a political agenda, rather than being based
on actual statistics about the wealth distribution of people in Britain.
There are, however, contexts in which the claim holds weight espe-
cially in the policies championed by the Thatcher government (and
continued by New Labour) that contributed to this blurring of the
lines between the classes, such as the move to increase home own-
ership and the rise in the number of people gaining a university edu-
cation.
This continued debate and confusion over the subject of class has
provided a rich source for much of the fiction produced during period
covered by this book. The field is still dominated by what could be
broadly called middle-class writers such as Monica Ali, Kingsley
Amis, Martin Amis, J. G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, A. S. Byatt, Jonathan
Coe, Margaret Drabble, Alan Hollinghurst, Nick Hornby, Kazuo
Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Jane Rogers, Salman Rushdie and Sarah
Waters. There has been, however, a rise in the number of novels that
are set in working-class locations or engage with working-class issues.
The literary context for this again goes back to the 1950s (and earlier).
That decade saw an increase in the number of novels that were con-
cerned to record and represent working-class experience in fiction, a
medium that had traditionally been the enclave of the middle classes.
Writers such as Alan Sillitoe, Keith Waterhouse, John Braine and
David Storey produced novels that were situated in working-class life
and as writers could claim to be a part of that social group. The
‘working-class’ novel as it came to be known, has become a staple of
introduction 11
British fiction from the 1950s onwards, although, significantly the tag
itself has become unfashionable. Writers such as Monica Ali, Pat
Barker, Julie Burchill, Angela Carter, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman,
John King, Courttia Newland, Zadie Smith, Alan Warner, Sarah
Waters, Irvine Welsh and Jeanette Winterson have all produced
novels that could be described as working-class in terms of the
primary cultural setting. As can be seen from this list, however, what
might in the 1950s have been described as working-class fiction tends
to get identified more with other social categories such as gender, sex-
uality, ethnicity, national identity and youth.
GENDER AND SEXUALITY
In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, a text

which can be identified as a founding moment of second wave fem-
inism. One of the central theses of the book was summed up by the
line, ‘I am not born a woman I become one’.13 This position recog-
nized that although individuals are born as male or female, the
development of masculinity and femininity is not determined
at birth, but is learned through the process of socialization.
Femininity and masculinity, therefore, are a series of artificial con-
structs or codes of behaviour that are maintained and reproduced by
the dominant ideas and practices in society. It was also shown that
the prevailing constructs of gender change historically. Identifying
these codes as constructed and historically contingent, and not
natural or essentialist, made it possible to argue for a resistance to
the way in which society had conventionally demarcated roles for
men and women. This fundamental proposition underpinning
many of the ideas in new wave feminism allowed for the political
campaigns during the 1960s and especially the seventies that
coalesced under the banner of the Women’s Liberation Movement.
Feminism, however, was far from a monolithic movement and
several, often competing, strands emerged in the later 1960s and
70s. In America, Betty Friedan, one of those involved in the devel-
opment of the new wave, advocated a form of feminism based on
equal rights for women and a sharing of the roles that society cur-
rently divided between the genders. In her important 1963 book,
The Feminine Mystique, she challenged the way in which women had
been designated certain roles which kept them subjugated, and
advocated the development of a society where women could enter
into public and professional life on an equal footing with men. This
form of feminism, however, tended to focus on women in middle-
class and upper-class environments and developed into ideas that
came to be referred to as liberal feminism. In Britain, feminist
writers and activists were often closely associated with socialist
political movements and tended to see women’s rights as part of a
wider social agenda that included class. Sheila Rowbotham, for
example, tried to argue in an influential pamphlet published in 1968
‘Women’s Liberation and the New Politics’, that women’s liberation
was an economic as well as cultural issue.14 In the British context
there was also a strong literary element to the Women’s Liberation
Movement including notable figures such as playwright Michelene
Wandor and literary critic Germaine Greer.15
With respect to literary criticism, the feminist movement devel-
oped in the 1970s in two main directions: the first was led by critics
such as Kate Millett and tended to identify sexist and often misog-
ynist positions in male-authored literature of the past; the second
by writers such as Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Ellen Moers and
Elaine Showalter, who tried to establish an alternative canon of
women’s literature, a body of writing sometimes referred to as gyn-
ocriticism.16 The influence of feminism on British fiction has been
profound, to the extent that today, contemporary women novelists
are just as likely to gain major literary awards and to be included on
contemporary fiction syllabuses as men. This is certainly not the
case if you look at any other period of British literature (with the
possible exception of the Victorian novel). Many British women
writers emerged (or were already established) in the late 1960s and
1970s who were keen to engage with feminist issues such as A. S.
Byatt, Angela Carter, Margaret Drabble, Janice Galloway, Doris
Lessing, Emma Tennant and Fay Weldon.
Alongside the Anglo-American tradition in feminist literary criti-
cism, certain British novelists have been more influenced by the
French feminists: Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva.
This body of work tended to engage more with poststructuralist
theories of language. Hélène Cixous, for example, argues that the
introduction 13
whole basis of Western language and philosophy has been based on

‘dual, hierarchical systems’ such as Activity/Passivity, Sun/Moon,
Culture/Nature and Man/Woman that place the female in either a
position of inferiority or invisibility: ‘Either woman is passive or she
does not exist’.17 Her own writing seeks to rectify this imbalance by
creating a new type of writing that combines literary creation with
criticism in an attempt to represent female experience through the
use of language and syntax. This experiment with writing and lan-
guage, labelled écriture féminine, identifies gender difference in the
very understanding of, and relationship between, words. This was not
entirely new in a British context, as Virginia Woolf had speculated
some years earlier on the way in which sentence structure could be
gendered. In ‘To Cambridge Women’ she identifies what she calls a
‘man’s sentence’ as ‘unsuited for a woman’s use’, and implicitly advo-
cates that women should try to develop a style of writing that dis-
tanced itself from the male tradition.18 Contemporary British writers
such as Jeanette Winterson and Janice Galloway have experimented
with language in a way that evokes this kind of gendered writing.
One of the problems associated with this line of thinking,
however, is that the kinds of sentence that are designated as female
tend to be loose, rambling, resist making a firm point and value
expression over logic. This, of course, could be construed as repro-
ducing the very characteristics that had traditionally been associated
with femininity in a patriarchal discourse. A different approach was
the taking over by women of those characteristics normally associ-
ated with masculinity and a figure that we have already encountered
looms large here. Margaret Thatcher has in many ways become an
unlikely icon of this kind of feminism, unlikely because she openly
disagreed with the main arguments put forward by feminists in the
1970s and 80s. She was, however, a visible example of the way in
which women could achieve top positions of power in the 1980s. To
do so, however, often involved her taking on what many regarded as
masculine characteristics. This fact in itself, though, suggested that
gender signification was independent of biological sex. To cite
Thatcher as a feminist icon is misleading in many ways, as the make-
up of parliament in the 1980s was overwhelmingly male, as was the
demographic of the leading figures in British industry and public
services. Nevertheless, a certain amount of the success of the
arguments put forward by feminism in the 1980s and into the 1990s
can be attributed to the fact that Britain had, for the first time in its
history, a female Prime Minister.
The success that feminism achieved in the 1970s and 1980s in
changing cultural perceptions of the accepted roles for men and
women in society began to be more noticeable in the 1990s, to the
extent that some cultural commentators and theorists began to talk
of a post-feminist situation. The concept of post-feminism can be
understood in two senses. Firstly, it can refer to the fact that most
of the main aims of second wave feminism from the 1960s to the
1980s had been achieved and consequently were no longer relevant
in the 1990s. Secondly, and in contradiction to this argument, post-
feminism could refer to the sense that although successes had
been achieved in equal rights, the most powerful and highly paid
positions in Britain were still predominately occupied by men. This
form of post-feminism recognized that the original objectives of the
Women’s Liberation Movement were still legitimate areas for pol-
itical campaigning despite the successes that had already been
achieved. Associated with the idea of post-feminism, the 1990s saw
the rise of significant popular cultural movements and trends. One
of these was the so-called ‘ladette’ culture, a form of social behav-
iour that advocated the pleasures and codes of practice that had pre-
viously been the enclave of young men, such as heavy drinking,
clubbing, and active pursuance of sexual partners. This popular
movement was led by phenomena such as the success of the Spice
Girls, who presented themselves as a kind of post-feminist gang,
who used sexuality on their own terms. The main spokesperson of
the band, Geri Halliwell, a fan of Mrs Thatcher, advocated a culture
where young women had the confidence to tell you what they
‘really, really want’, and were able to get it.
The successes of feminism also affected the way in which mas-
culinity was re-assessed during the period. One of the original
tenets of feminism was that men were as conditioned by prevailing
gender codes as women; as Betty Friedan put it: ‘Men weren’t really
the enemy – they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded
masculine mystique’.19 In the 1980s the idea of the New Man began
to circulate, which referred to a male (usually heterosexual) that was
in touch with his feminine side and who broadly agreed with the
introduction 15
idea of women’s equality. Many male writers began to explore the

new gender frameworks that were emerging due to the successes
and visibility of feminism and how this had developed new
definitions of masculinity. Writers such as Martin Amis and Julian
Barnes in the 1980s and Nick Hornby, Tony Parsons and John King
were interested in what constituted masculinity in the 1990s, and
how that had changed since their fathers’ generation.
The emergence of new genres of popular fiction given the
provocative titles of chick lit and lad lit reflected this concern with
the new parameters of femininity and masculinity and how indi-
viduals growing up in contemporary society are forced to negotiate
these new constructs. Chick lit novelists like Helen Fielding and
Jane Green produce coming of age narratives in which female pro-
tagonists attempt to find their place in the world, usually in hetero-
sexual partnerships with men who appear to effortlessly combine
the benefits of both older and newer forms of masculinity: new
men, who are not too new.20
The years from the end of the 1960s also saw a sea change in atti-
tudes towards homosexuality, which has also found its place in
British fiction in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In many
ways the Gay Liberation Movement that emerged in North
America and Western Europe in the late 1960s ran parallel with the
Women’s Liberation Movement, and their interests and agendas
often overlapped.
In a British context, the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 decrimi-
nalized homosexuality for consenting adults over the age of 21 in
England and Wales.21 However, continued inequalities in the law,
everyday prejudice and acts of violence against homosexuals neces-
sitated the formation and continuation of Gay and Lesbian rights
movements in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. One of the major
international events that had influence in Britain was the riot at the
Stonewall Inn, a lesbian and gay club in New York City, in May
1969. The riot was a response to the unjustified but repeated raids
on the bar made by police during this period. These events served
to bring to popular attention the injustices carried out against the
gay and lesbian community generally, and served to strengthen
resistance against this kind of prejudice in both Britain and the
States. Various pieces of legislation have been passed from the
sixties onwards that have, due in no small part to the efforts of

sexual politics campaigners, redressed some of the inequalities in
Britain with respect to homosexuality, most recently in Britain in
the Civil Partnership Act of 2004, which grants same-sex couples
the same rights and responsibilities as a civil marriage.
In terms of the theoretical approaches to sexuality, ‘queer theory’
developed amongst intellectuals in the late 1980s and 1990s and
aimed to disrupt the way in which sexual and gender identities are
constructed in society. Like French feminism, it was highly inflected
with ideas from poststructuralist theory, and in particular the
seminal work produced by Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality
(1976).22 Part of the aim was to champion aspects of gay culture as a
response to the sense in which it was still regarded as a form of tol-
erated deviance in many parts of mainstream culture. ‘Queer’ had
previously been used as a term of abuse against homosexual men and
women, but this body of theory reclaimed the word and gave it
positive connotations. Theorists such as Teresa de Lauretis, Judith
Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick produced important work in this
field in the 1990s, the latter two in the area of literary studies.
Recent British fiction has been a rich source for the exploration
of gay, lesbian and bisexual relationships, and as a cultural space in
which to raise political and social issues around sexuality. The
increasing acceptance of gay and lesbian fiction is in part a reflection
of the successes of the Gay Rights Movement of the 1970s and 80s
and there has been mainstream success for what a couple of decades
ago would have been marginalized as gay fiction, for example in the
work of Julie Burchill, Hanif Kureishi, Alan Hollinghurst, Adam
Mars-Jones, Jeanette Winterson and Sarah Waters.
POSTCOLONIALISM, MULTICULTURALISM AND

NATIONAL IDENTITY
On the 15 August 1947 the new sovereign nation of India was born
as it gained independence from Britain. India was always the jewel
in the crown of the British Empire and its loss represented a key
moment in British history. Perhaps more importantly it signalled
the beginning of the gradual dismantling of most of the Empire
introduction 17
over the next fifty years or so. The legacy of colonialism has been
one of the most far reaching influences both on the former colonies
and also on Britain itself, both in terms of its position in the new
world order after 1945, and also in the changing nature of its home
population. The term postcolonialism has been coined to define
this new state of affairs and a series of theories and discourses has
arisen in many fields to explain and assess the impact of this enor-
mous shift in the political organization of the world. Britain has
continued to maintain links with many of the former colonies
through the establishment of the Commonwealth, which is an asso-
ciation of many of the countries that used to be ruled by Britain.
This continued association has also affected the pattern of migra-
tion and has been a significant feature of Britain’s population demo-
graphic in the years following the Second World War.
From the 1950s onwards Britain has developed into a multicul-
tural nation as groups of people moved from parts of the Caribbean,
South East Asia and Africa (as well as other parts of the world) and
settled in Britain, often in communities that gathered together in
Britain’s urban areas. This series of diasporas has changed the face
of British society and culture in profound ways, but has not always
been a smooth process. Many of the areas that the new arrivals
settled in were often deprived, where the older populations were
themselves suffering social and economic adversity. There has
always been resistance in certain quarters to the development of
communities from other parts of the world, often exacerbated by
successive governments playing the so-called ‘race card’ – rhetoric
designed to create unnecessary fear amongst the established British
population with images of being invaded and swamped by immi-
grants. Enoch Powell, for example, in 1968 delivered his now infa-
mous ‘rivers of blood’ speech warning against the dangers of
immigration.23 In reality, immigration has been gradual over the
period, and in fact, people from minority ethnic groups have never
made up more than 8 per cent of the British population.
Political attitudes to immigration have vacillated over the period,
and tend to shift from the idea that wholesale assimilation into a sense
of Britishness is the preferred outcome, to a model of multicultural-
ism, whereby immigrant communities retain a sense of their original
cultures whilst adapting to the cultural make-up of Britain. In
practice the immigrant experience tends to involve a mixture of

assimilation and multiculturalism, which is often dependent on other
issues such as class, gender and religion. Alongside this process there
have been periods that have seen the increase in tensions between
ethnic communities, most often seen in inner city areas, for example,
in the riots that occurred in Brixton, Chapeltown, Toxteth, and Moss
Side in the early 1980s, and in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham in the
early 2000s. To blame these outbreaks of popular violence on issues
of race alone is to overlook the range of complex factors related to
class, social deprivation and community relations with figures of
authority such as the police. Nevertheless, the grievances of groups
that coalesce around ethnic identities and the presence of right-wing
political parties such as the National Front in the 1970s and 1980s
and the British National Party over the last two decades have exacer-
bated underlying tensions within such communities. As discussed in
Chapters 2 and 5 (respectively), both Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and
Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) detail the kinds of
racially motivated violence meted out to innocent members of ethnic
minorities.
British literature has been a cultural space in which the experiences
of immigrants and broader political issues associated with these expe-
riences have been articulated. There has, necessarily, been a certain
amount of negotiation of the tradition of the English novel involved
here. One of the dilemmas of postcolonial fiction is the attitude the
colonized writing takes towards the literary paradigms and values of
the colonizing nation. As Edward Said has shown, literature is far
from a neutral form of discourse in the processes that were involved
in the building and maintaining of Empire. Said’s model of oriental-
ism shows how a range of discourses including literature served to
define a ‘positional superiority’ of the West in relation to the peoples
and cultures of the orient, and this theory can be applied to a range of
colonized nations extending across the Empire.24 One of the aims of
postcolonial literature has been to readdress the way in which ethnic
minorities have been constructed in British literature. In the context
of this book, this has found particular resonance in the development
of what has come to be called ‘Black British’ fiction. It needs to be
stressed at the outset that there are obvious problems with lumping
together a range of very different writers such as Monica Ali, Hanif
introduction 19
Kureishi, Courttia Newland, Caryl Phillips, Salman Rushdie and

Zadie Smith under such a heading. Nevertheless the novels they have
produced have addressed, in different ways, issues associated with the
multiethnic nature of contemporary Britain. One of the ways in
which this has been achieved is through attention to language. For the
postcolonial writer, as Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen
Tiffin have noted, English is in one sense the language of the oppres-
sor and many of the writers mentioned above have been forced to
negotiate this fact. In Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983) for example,
the narrator speaks of ‘this Angrezi [English] in which I am forced to
write’ whilst Zadie Smith has one of her characters note that ‘only the
immigrants speak Queen’s English these days’.25
One of the other key factors affecting national identity is the devo-
lution of power within Britain, especially in the years since 1997.
Scotland has its own parliament, Wales and Northern Ireland have
their own assemblies all with a certain amount of legislative power.
The new sense of national identity that these political changes have
wrought, did not, of course, begin in 1997, and in some ways devo-
lution was in response to the strong sense of separateness from
England felt by many in those nations. The issues raised by colonial
and postcolonial identity could, therefore, be extended to include the
nations within the United Kingdom. To a certain extent, writers
from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have found themselves
to be in a similar ‘postcolonial’ position in that distinct national lit-
eratures have sought to distinguish themselves from both English
and the imposition of a homogenous ‘British’ culture. In a Scottish
context, writers such as James Kelman and Irvine Welsh have fore-
grounded the use of types of Scottish vernacular to distance the nar-
rative from any collective sense of a British identity. Take, for
example, the following passage from James Kelman’s How Late it
Was, How Late (1994):
There wasnay much he could do, there wasnay really much he

could do at all. No the now anyway. Nayn of it was down to
him.26
Here, the disruption of conventional syntax and the use of words to

convey dialect corresponds with one of the aims of postcolonial
writing as identified by Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin: ‘The crucial

function of language as a medium of power demands that postcolo-
nial writing define itself by seizing the language of the centre and re-
placing it in a discourse fully adapted to the colonized space’.27 In
Kelman’s case, demotic language is used to distance the text, lin-
guistically and culturally from English, whilst re-placing it in a
Scottish context. Writing, in this way becomes political in its very
syntax and word choice. This issue has also been dealt with in the
context of some recent Welsh and Northern Irish writing. Niall
Griffiths, for example, addresses the idea of contemporary Welshness
in his novel Sheepshagger (2001), the title of which aggressively
reverses one of the ways in which the English (in particular) have
prejudiced and mocked the Welsh. Much contemporary fiction,
then, has been keen to engage with the shifting positions of national
identity over the last thirty years and I will return to this issue in
Chapter 5, especially in the discussion of the representation of
Englishness in Julian Barnes’s novel England, England (1998).
The complexity of the internal make-up of the United Kingdom
in addition to its engagement with a series of other national identi-
ties has made the issue of ethnicity extremely complex in contem-
porary Britain. As Richard Bradford notes, ‘It would seem that
within these islands the permutations upon identity, separateness,
conflict and division are almost without limit’.28 Certain ideas
arising from postcolonial theory, however, have been useful in
attempting to analyse these differences. One of these is Homi
Bhabha’s concept of hybridity and what he calls the third space.29
Hybridity refers to the way in which two or more cultures combine
in colonial and postcolonial relationships, but in doing so, refuse to
privilege any one of the constituent parts. Thereby, the power rela-
tionship assumed in typical hierarchies between the colonized and
the colonizer are avoided. This can be taken at the level of racial
identity, whereby children of ‘mixed-race’ marriages could be
described as hybrid, but more importantly in a cultural sense,
whereby the idea of a ‘third space’ identifies a location of culture
that rejects the binary oppositional framework in which race and
the idea of ethnic origin has often operated. The third space is a new
hybrid, but also contains the sense of the dual heritages that have
contributed to its formation.
introduction 21
A second theory that has proved useful in this context is Stuart

Hall’s concept of new ethnicities. Hall identifies two trends in the
historical development of racial politics, the first being when ‘black’
became an important signifier of cultural identity and allowed for
a politics of resistance against racism in Britain. This involved
challenging the use of black stereotypes in mainstream literature
and culture, a process that gained ground from the 1950s onwards.
It also championed the development of what became recognized
as ‘Black British’ art and literature. The second context devel-
oped from the first and recognized that, in practice, there is a range
of marginalized positions, a fact that complicates the idea of a
unified ‘black’ subject in opposition to a ‘white’ subject. In ‘New
Ethnicities’, Hall writes of the need to recognize that, ‘ “black” is
essentially a politically and culturally constructed category’, and that
‘the immense diversity and differentiation of the historical and cul-
tural experience of black subjects [. . .] inevitably entails a weaken-
ing or fading of the notion [of] “race” ’.30 This leads to what Hall
identifies as a range of new ethnicities that not only relate to issues
of race but also to class, gender, sexuality and youth. In addition,
the ‘black’ subject is itself subject to a variety of different positions
and particular histories. As Hall notes, it is no longer accurate or
useful to talk of monolithic categories of race such as black and
white when in practice much of Britain’s ethnicity is made up of a
series of identities that negotiate each of these categories.
A number of writers who have immigrated to Britain from
former colonies or are the children of such immigrants have been
producing novels since the 1950s that have articulated this experi-
ence, and have to differing degrees addressed some of the issues
raised by Bhabha and Hall. The list is a long one, but includes such
writers as Sam Selvon, Edward Brathwaite, V. S. Naipaul, Wilson
Harris, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Courttia Newland, Zadie
Smith and Monica Ali.
YOUTH AND SUBCULTURES
One significant theme in contemporary British fiction is the repre-

sentation of youth and the experience of growing up in Britain. The
coming of age narrative, or the Bildungsroman has been a staple of

the British novel since the birth of the form in the early eighteenth
century, and it is a form that aids the combination of a narrative plot
line with the description of the social and cultural environments
through which the main protagonist moves. Formally, either
through the use of first-person or third-person narratives, the
coming of age story allows for the workings of society to be
described as if from a fresh perspective, and through the technique
of defamiliarization, a cultural critique can be produced of some of
the practices of contemporary society encountered for the first time
by the protagonist.
In this book there are several novels that engage with the
Bildungsroman form, although in some cases a parody of the nine-
teenth century model is often produced, for example, in the fantas-
tic adventures experienced by the central character in Angela
Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977). Other examples discussed
in this book include, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Jeanette Winterson’s
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch
(1992), Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A
Romance (1990), Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia and
Julian Barnes’s England, England, whilst Zadie Smith’s White Teeth
and Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (1992) also include coming of age
narratives within their broader framework.
Within the genre of the Bildungsroman a more specific trend in
fiction has developed since the 1950s that could be described as sub-
cultural fiction. These are novels that set out to explore the inner
world of certain youth cultures that have their own codes of practice,
fashion and artistic styles and are usually identified by a particular
style of music. This kind of fiction can perhaps be traced to one novel
produced in the late 1950s, Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners
(1959), which set out to describe, through the eyes of its teenage hero,
the emerging youth cultures of the later half of the 1950s that
included Teds, jazz fans (both traditional and modern) and the emer-
gence of a group of sharp-dressed teenagers that later came to be
known as Mods.31 Within this framework, MacInnes explored post-
war British society in terms of the legacies of Empire and the emer-
gence of new ethnic subcultures in London, culminating in a
fictional account of the actual ‘race’ riots in Notting Hill in 1958.
introduction 23
MacInnes’s book set the model for a development of similar sub-

cultural fictions throughout the 1960s and 1970s including Nik
Cohn’s rock’n’roll fiction and Richard Allen and Stewart Home’s
series of Skinhead novels.32 In the 1980s and 1990s this trend con-
tinued through a range of different youth subcultures, especially
in the ‘club culture’ narratives of the late eighties. These texts
explored the world of alternative subcultural spaces such as illegal
raves and gatherings and the use of drugs and other forms of crim-
inality. The writers in this genre that emerged during this period
include Irvine Welsh and Nicholas Blincoe.33 Perhaps the most well
known of these novels is Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) which dealt
with the heroin-charged drug scene in Edinburgh in the late
1980s and early 1990s. The main characters in the novel, Renton,
Sick-Boy and Begbie, represent a kind of subcultural manifestation
of Thatcher’s Britain in that they are imbued with a selfish self-
preservation that is an inverted reflection of the Yuppie culture of
the period. This is made evident in Renton’s decision to betray the
rest of the group at the end of the novel. Within this narrative,
Welsh is able to produce a critique of the society that has influenced
contemporary working-class life in Scotland especially for youth
from deprived areas of Edinburgh.
The representation of youth subcultures in fiction has fed off work
done in cultural studies. The British New Left in the 1950s became
increasingly interested in the sociological and political factors behind
the rise of youth culture, although tended on the whole to produce
negative images of youth as followers of an Americanized ‘shiny bar-
barism’, a term coined by Richard Hoggart, one of the members asso-
ciated with this group.34 Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel’s book The
Popular Arts (1964) took a more open view of the place of popular cul-
tural forms in the early 1960s including television, fashion and pop
music styles.35 Much work done by the Contemporary Centre for
Cultural Studies at Birmingham University centred on youth culture,
with sociologists and cultural commentators such as Phil Cohen, Paul
Willis, Angela McRobbie, Jenny Garber and Gary Clarke.36 Dick
Hebdige’s seminal 1979 book Subcultures: The Meaning of Style intro-
duced an analysis based on semiotics to the study of subcultural fash-
ions, and in particular the bricolage style adopted by the then new
phenomenon of punk.37
Subcultural influences can be seen to affect several characters in

the novels discussed in this book, including the younger characters
in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, and
perhaps most significantly in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of
Suburbia, which in part, takes the transition of subcultural styles
from hippies to glam rock to punk as one of the narrative threads in
the novel.
A NOTE ON THEORY
One of the key contexts in which contemporary fiction is studied

at university is in relation to what has been seen as the explosion
of literary and cultural theory from the 1950s onwards. For most
of the early twentieth century and after the war, literary criticism
was a mixture of author-centred criticism, which tended to deter-
mine the meaning of texts through reference to the author’s life,
and literary-historical criticism, which tried to place an author’s
text with respect to the literary period in which they were
working. In the mid-twentieth century, this was accompanied by
a series of approaches that were gathered under the heading of
formalism. This included Russian formalism, which generally
adopted a linguistic approach to literature and was interested in
what gave literature its literariness. This loose grouping includes
such figures as Mikhail Bakhtin and Viktor Skhlovsky and intro-
duced concepts such as heteroglossia and defamiliarization.38
In an American context, critics like Cleanth Brooks, William
Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley developed a different kind of for-
malism. Brooks was interested in the way poetry worked by
setting up linguistic oppositions and paradoxes, whilst Wimsatt
and Beardsley rejected the author’s intention as a useful source
for trying to determine the meaning of a text, and encouraged an
approach that concentrated on the organization of the words on
the page and how meaning was produced independently from the
author.39 This New Criticism distinguished itself from author-
centred approaches as did two influential British literary theorists
in the mid decades of the twentieth century, I. A. Richards and
F. R. Leavis. Richards encouraged a form of analysis that had
introduction 25
allegiances with the American New Critics and advocated ‘prac-

tical criticism’ which involved the ‘close reading’ of texts.40 The
New Critics and Richards tended to focus on poetry, as their
attention to detail could be sustained more easily with relatively
shorter texts. F. R. Leavis, on the other hand, wrote significantly
on the English novel. Leavis imbued literary criticism not only
with an evaluative critical faculty, but also with a sense of moral-
ity. He made bold claims for the novel arguing that in the great-
est examples of the form it produced a philosophical and ethical
investigation into the human condition, and that criticism of
such novels necessitated a corresponding seriousness from the
critic.41
Each of these approaches has relevance in the practical analysis of
contemporary British fiction, however, from the 1960s onwards, this
fairly straightforward range of critical positions exploded in a
number of different directions too numerous to cover in detail here.
For the study of contemporary British fiction it is a great advantage
to know a little of the following ‘schools’ or loose groupings of
literary and critical theory: Marxism, feminism (and post-femi-
nism), structuralism, poststructuralism (including deconstruction),
reader-response criticism, postmodernism, queer theory, postcolo-
nialism, ecology and theories developed from cultural studies. The
following chapters will introduce some of the main points related to
these theories as and when they are relevant to the particular novels
under discussion. Many of the writers covered in this book, such as
Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, A. S. Byatt and Salman Rushdie, have
a knowledge of the recent developments in literary and cultural
theory and often refer to these ideas in their novels. There are a
number of very good introductions and guides to literary theory and
in the reading list at the end of this book there is a list of the most
useful.
SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS
• Both ‘contemporary’ and ‘British’ are problematic categories

that need to be addressed when discussing the fiction produced
over the last thirty years.
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BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. CCCCXXXIX. MAY, 1852. Vol.
LXXI.
CONTENTS.
Gold: its Natural and Civil History, 517

Life of Niebuhr, 542
Thomas Moore, 559
My Novel; or, Varieties in English Life. Part XXI., 569
Our London Commissioner. No. II., 596
The Gold-Finder, 607
The Vineyards of Bordeaux, 617
The Democratic Confederacy, 626
EDINBURGH:
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD SONS, 45 GEORGE
STREET;
AND 37 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.
To whom all communications (post paid) must be addressed.
SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.

BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. CCCCXXXIX. MAY, 1852. Vol.

LXXI.
GOLD: ITS NATURAL AND CIVIL HISTORY.

[1][2]
The progress of knowledge naturally leads to the discovery not

only of new arts, and of new uses for artificial productions, but of
new stores of natural wealth in the bowels of the earth itself, and of
new methods of extracting and rendering them useful. This last point
is amply illustrated by the history of the progressive discovery and
development of our own most valuable mineral treasures—the coal
and ironstone deposits—which add so much both to our natural
resources and to our national strength.
But, independent of the advance of knowledge, the exploration and
colonisation of new countries by a civilised race leads of necessity to
the discovery of regions rich in mineral wealth, which were unknown
before, and brings new metallic supplies into the markets of the
world.
When Spain conquered Mexico first, and afterwards Peru and
Chili, Europe became flooded with the precious metals to a degree
unknown before in the history of modern nations. When Russia
began to explore her provinces on the slopes of the Ural, gold-
washings were discovered, which have, by their enormous yield,
made up for the deficient supply which commotion and misrule in
Central and Southern America had caused in European countries.
The possession of California by an observant and curious people, of
Anglo-Saxon breed, was almost immediately followed by those
wonderful discoveries which have made the world ring, and have
attracted adventurers from every region. And, lastly, the turning of
keen eyes upon river beds in Australia—still less known and
examined than almost any district of America without the Arctic
circle—has brought to light those vast stores of gold which appear
destined to lay the basis of a new empire in the Australian
archipelago.
Nor have such discoveries been confined to the so-called precious
metals. The advance of North American civilisation towards the head
waters of the Missouri has made known abundant mines of lead,
which the cost of transport chiefly prevents as yet from seriously
competing with European produce along the Atlantic border. The
joint march of Canada and the United States along the shores of Lake
Superior, has laid open veins of copper of inexhaustible magnitude—
on a scale, we may say, in size and richness commensurate with the
other great natural features of the American continent;—while, of
coal and ironstone, the Central States of the Union are so full, that
imagination itself cannot conceive a time when they shall cease to be
sufficient for the wants of the whole civilised world.
Men untrained themselves to observe, and ignorant that it is
intellectual knowledge which opens and guides the eye, affect to
wonder—often, indeed, do seriously wonder—that gold so plentifully
scattered over the surface of a country as it is said to be in California
and Australia, or sprinkling with its yellow sheen thick veins of
snowy quartz, should, for a time so comparatively long, have escaped
observation. “What surprises me,” says Captain Sutter, in whose
mill-race the gold was first discovered, “is, that this country should
have been visited by so many scientific men, and that not one of
them should have ever stumbled upon these treasures; that scores of
keen-eyed trappers should have crossed the valley in every direction,
and tribes of Indians have dwelt in it for centuries, and yet this gold
should never have been discovered. I myself have passed the very
spot above a hundred times during the last ten years, but was just as
blind as the rest of them, so I must not wonder at the discovery not
having been made earlier.”[3]
Such seeming blindness, indeed, is not really a matter of surprise.
The ability to observe is an intellectual gift no less than the ability to
reason; and, like the latter talent, the former also must be trained. It
must be taught where to look, and what to look for; what the signs
are of the presence of the thing we wish to find, and where they are
likely to be met with.
It is not, in truth, a just reproach to unsuspecting men, that they
have not seen what they never imagined the presence of. It would
scarcely have been so, had they failed to see in a given place what
they were told was likely to be found. Many of our readers are
familiar with the existence of black lines in the solar spectrum; many
may have seen them, and justly wondered. Some may even recollect,
when, years ago, Frauenhofer first announced their existence, how
opticians everywhere mounted their most homogeneous prisms, and
gazed at the spectrum eager to see them, and how many looked in
vain. Of course, the failure was ascribed to the imperfection of their
prisms, and not to their own defective skill. One philosopher we
remember, then already distinguished, and whom now all delight to
honour, of whom it was told that having obtained one of the
beautifully perfect prisms of Frauenhofer’s own manufacture, he was
still unable to see the lines; but that another who had seen them
came to his aid, instructed him how to look, and in an instant he not
only clearly saw them, but exclaimed with wonder at his own
blindness. Such were our own sensations also when first we saw
them. Was it, then, a reproach to Sir Isaac Newton and his successors
that these lines escaped them? The same reproach might be made to
the predecessors of almost every discoverer in every walk of modern
science. Many before him probably had looked from the same spot,
with similar advantages for seeing, and had not seen. But they had
gazed without any special object or previous instruction, and they
had failed to discern what another coming after them, prepared to
look for it, and knowing what it was like, and where likely to be,
would have at once descried.
Hence the discovery of most of the rich mines in past times was
the result of some unlooked-for accident happening generally to
naturally-observant but ignorant men. Thus Jacob says of the mines
in the Hartz—
“There are various conflicting opinions among the learned in antiquities

respecting the discovery of the mineral wealth of the Hartz. The most probable
accounts fix it in the tenth century; and the tradition is, that a hunter of the name
of Ramm, when engaged in the chase, had fastened his horse to a tree, who, by
pawing with his feet, had scraped away the soil, and thereby discovered some
minerals; that specimens of them were sent to the Emperor Otho, to whom all
minerals, as regalities of the Empire, belonged, and who sent expert miners to
examine the district, from Franconia.”—(Jacob, i. p. 254.)
And again of the mines of Saxony—
“The mines of Saxony were first discovered in the tenth century, when the whole
district in which they are situated was covered with wood and without inhabitants.
Some carriers from Halle, on their way to Bohemia, whither they carried salt,
observing metallic substances in the tracks made by the wheels, some of these were
taken up and sent to Goslar to be examined, when they were found to consist of
lead with a considerable quantity of silver. This led to the establishments for
mining, which have continued, with some variations in their products, from the
year 1169 to the present day.”—(Jacob, i. p. 252.)
And of the mines of Potosi—
“In the latter end of the year 1545 the mines of the Cerro de Potosi were
accidentally discovered. According to the account of Herrera, the discovery was
owing to an Indian hunter, Diego Hualca, who, in pulling up a shrub, observed
filaments of pure silver about the roots. On examination the mass was found to be
enormous, and a very great part of the population was thereby drawn to the spot
and employed in extracting the metal. A city soon sprang up, though in a district of
unusual sterility. The mountain was perforated on all sides, and the produce, in a
few of the first years, exceeded whatever has been recorded of the richest mines in
the world.”—(Jacob, ii. p. 57.)
And so with the discovery of the rich washings of California. As
early as the time of Queen Anne, Captain Sheldrake, in command of
an English privateer on the coast, discovered that the black sands of
the rivers—such as the washers now find at the bottom of their
rockers—yielded gold largely, and pronounced the whole country to
be rich in gold. But it remained in the hands of the Indians and the
Jesuit fathers till 1820, when California was made a territory of the
Mexican commonwealth, and a small party of adventurers came in.
Captain Sheldrake and his published opinions had then been long
forgotten,[4] and an accident made known again the golden sands in
1848, after the territory had been ceded to, and was already
attracting adventurers from, the United States.
“The discoverer was Mr Marshall, who, in September 1847, had contracted with
Captain Sutter to build a saw-mill near some pine woods on the American Fork,
now a well-known feeder of the Sacramento river. In the spring of 1848 the saw-
mill was nearly ready, the dam and race being constructed; but, when the water
was set on to the wheel, the tail-race was found too narrow to let the water through
quick enough. Mr Marshall, to save work, let the water right into the race with a
strong stream, so as to sweep the race wider and deeper. This it did, and a great
bank of gravel and mud was driven to the foot of the race. One day, Mr Marshall,
on walking down the race to this bank, saw some glittering bits on the upper edge,
and, having gathered a few, examined them and conjectured their value. He went
down to Sutter’s Fort and told the captain, and they agreed to keep it a secret until
a certain grist mill of the captain’s was finished. The news got about, however; a
cunning Yankee carpenter having followed them in their visit to the mill-race, and
found out the gold scales.
Forthwith the news spread. The first workmen were lucky, and in a few weeks
some gold was sent to San Francisco, and speedily the town was emptied of people.
In three months there were four thousand men at the diggings—Indians having
been hired, eighty soldiers deserted from the American posts, and runaways
getting up from the ships in the harbour. Such ships as got away carried news to
Europe and the United States; and, by the beginning of 1849, both sides of the
Atlantic were in agitation.”—(Wyld, pp. 34, 35.)
But when no accident has intervened to force the discovery upon

the unsuspecting or unobservant, it has sometimes happened that
great riches, unseen by others, have been discovered by persons who
knew what to look for, what were the signs of the presence of the
thing sought, and who had gone to particular places for the purpose
of exploration. Such was the case in Australia.
The preliminary history of the Australian discovery is peculiar.
From what he had seen of the Ural, and had learned of the
composition of the chief meridian mountain ridge of Australia, Sir
Roderick Murchison publicly announced, in 1845, his belief that
Australia was a country in which gold was likely to be found—
recommended that it should be sought for, and even memorialised
the home government on the subject.[5] But although this opinion
and recommendation were inserted and commented upon in the
colonial newspapers—although the Rev. W. B. Clarke published
letters predicting, for reasons given, the discovery of gold deposits in
California and Australia—although
“Sir Francis Forbes of Sydney subsequently published and circulated in New

South Wales a paper, in which he affirmed in the strongest manner, on scientific
data, the existence of gold formations in New Holland—although a colonial
geologist had been sent out some years before and was settled at Sydney—and
lastly, although one part of the prediction was soon so wonderfully fulfilled by the
Californian discoveries—yet oven the discoveries in California did not arouse the
New Hollanders to adequate researches, though reports were spread of wonderful
discoveries in Victoria and South Australia, which were speedily discredited. It was
reserved for a gentleman of New South Wales, Mr Edward Hammond Hargraves,
to make the definite discoveries. He appears to have acted independently of all
previous views on the subject; but having acquired experience in California, and
being struck with the resemblance between the Californian formations and those of
New Holland, he determined on a systematic search for gold, which he brought to a
successful issue on the 12th of February of this year 1850, by the discovery of gold
diggings in the Bathurst and Wellington districts, and which he prosecuted until he
had ascertained the existence of gold sands in no less than twelve places.”—(Wyld,
p. 30.)
When this was made known by Mr Hargraves in a formal report to

the authorities at Sydney, in April 1850, they then (!) despatched the
provincial geologist to examine the localities, and confirm the
discoveries of Mr Hargraves! But the public did not wait for such
confirmation. On the 1st of May the discoveries became known in
Sydney. In thousands the people forsook the city, the villages, cattle
stations, and farms, in the interior, for the neighbourhood of
Bathurst, where the gold had been found. Summerhill Creek alone
soon numbered its four thousand diggers, who thence speedily
spread themselves along the other head waters of the Darling and
Murrumbidgee—rivers flowing westward from the inland slope of the
mountain ridge, (Blue Mountains and Liverpool range,) which runs
nearly parallel to the south-eastern coast of Australia, and at the
distance from it of about one hundred miles. Near Bathurst the
summit of the ridge attains, in Mount Canobolus, a height of 4461
feet. In numerous places among the feeders of these streams, which
themselves unite lower down to form the main channel of the
Murray, gold was speedily found. It was successfully extracted also
from the upper course of the Hunter River, and from the channel of
Cox’s River—both descending from the eastern slope of the same
ridge, within the province of New South Wales. In the province of
Victoria, the feeders of the Glenelg and other rivers, which descend
from the southern prolongation of the same chain—the Australian
Pyrenees—have yielded large quantities of gold; and recently,
Geelong and Melbourne have become the scene of an excitement
scarcely inferior to that which has longer prevailed in the country
round Bathurst. South Australia also, where the main river, Murray,
passes through it to the sea at Adelaide, has been reported to contain
the precious metal. So suddenly does the first spark of real fire
spread into a great flame of discovery—so clearly can all eyes see,
when taught how to look, what to look for, and in what
circumstances.
But in New South Wales, and in the province of Victoria, the
excitement, and the zeal and success in digging, have up to the latest
advices been the greatest. In the beginning of June 1850, the
Governor-General had already bestowed a grant of £500 upon Mr
Hargraves, and an appointment of £350 a-year, as acknowledgments
of his services—acknowledgments he well deserved, but which might
have been saved honourably to the colony, and creditably to science,
had the recommendation made five years before by geologists at
home, and by scientific colonists, been attended to. In the same
month the Sir Thomas Arbuthnot sailed from Sydney for England
with £4000 worth of gold already among her cargo. The success of
the explorers continues unchecked up to the latest arrivals from
Australia. “When I left, on the 10th of August 1851,” says the captain
of one of her Majesty’s ships of war, in a letter now before us, “there
was then weekly coming into Sydney £13,000 of gold. One lump has
been found one hundred and six pounds in weight.” He adds, and we
believe many are of this opinion, “that it appears to be one immense
gold field, and that California is already thrown into the shade.” The
news of five months’ later date only give additional strength to all
previous announcements, anticipations, and predictions.
Now, in reflecting on these remarkable and generally unexpected
discoveries, an enlightened curiosity suggests such questions as
these:—What are the conditions geographical, physical, or geological,
on which the occurrence of gold deposits depends? Why has the
ability to predict, as in the Australian case, remained so long
unexercised, or been so lately acquired? What are the absolute
extent, and probable productive durability, of the gold regions newly
brought to light? What their extent and richness compared with
those known at former periods, or with those which influence the
market for precious metals now? What the influence they are likely
to exercise on the social and financial relations of European
countries? What the effect they will have on the growth and
commerce of the States which border the Pacific, or which are
washed by the Indian and Australian seas? In the present article we
propose to answer a few of these questions.
And, first, as to the Geography of the question. There are no limits
either in latitude or longitude, as used to be supposed, within which
gold deposits are confined—none within which they are necessarily
most abundant. In old times, the opinion was entertained that the
precious metals favoured most the hot and equatorial regions of the
earth. But the mines of Siberia, as far north as 69° of latitude, and
the deposits of California, supposed to extend into Oregon, and even
into Russian America, alone show the absurdity of this opinion.
Nor does the physical character of a country determine in any
degree whether or not it shall be productive of gold. It may, like
California, border the sea, or be far inland, like the Ural slopes, or
the Steppes of the Kirghis; it may be flat, and of little elevation, or it
may abound in streams, in lakes, and in mountains;—none of these
conditions are necessarily connected with washings or veins of gold.
It is true that mountain chains are usually seen at no great distance
from localities rich in golden sands, and that metalliferous veins
often cut through the mountains themselves. But these
circumstances are independent of the mountains as mere physical
features. It is not because there are mountains in a country that it is
rich in gold, else gold mines would be far more frequent; and
mountainous regions, like our own northern counties, would abound
in mineral wealth. It is the nature of the rocks of which a country
consists—its geological and chemical characters, in other words,
which determine the presence or absence of the most coveted of
metals. Humboldt, indeed, supposed, from his observations, that, to
be productive of gold, the chain of mountains which skirt the country
must have a meridional direction. But further research has shown
that this is by no means a necessary condition, although hitherto,
perhaps, more gold has been met with in the neighbourhood of
chains which have a prevailing north or south direction than of any
other. We may safely say, therefore, that there are no known physical
laws or conditions, by the application or presence of which the
existence of gold can with any degree of probability be predicted.
Let us study for a little, then, the geology of a region of gold.
First, Every general reader now-a-days is aware that the crust of
our globe consists of a series of beds of rock, laid one over the other,
like the leaves of a book; and that of these the lowest layers, like the
courses of stone in the wall of a building, are the oldest, or were the
first laid down. These rocky beds are divided into three groups, of
which the lowest, or oldest, is called the primary; the next in order,
the secondary; and the uppermost, or newest, the tertiary.
Second, That in certain parts of the world this outer crust of rocks
is broken through by living volcanoes, which, with intermissions
more or less frequent, belch forth flames and smoke, with occasional
torrents of burning lava. That where, or when, the cause of such
eruptions is not sufficiently powerful to produce living volcanoes,
earthquakes are occasioned; cracks or fissures, more or less wide, are
produced in the solid rocks; smoking fumeroles appear; and vapour-
exhaling surfaces show that fires, though languid and dormant for
the time, still exist beneath. That besides the rocks of lava they have
poured out, these volcanic agencies change the surface of a country
more widely still by the alterations they gradually effect upon the
previously existing slaty, calcareous, or sandstone rocks; converting
limestone into marble, and baking sandstone into more or less
homogeneous quartz, and common slates or hardened clays into
mica slates, gneiss, and granite-like rocks. That such volcanic
agencies, producing similar phenomena, have existed in every
geological epoch; and though the evidences of these are most
extensive and distinct, perhaps, among the rocks of the oldest or
primary period, that they are numerous and manifest also among
those of the secondary and tertiary periods.
Third, That rocks of every age and kind, when exposed to the
action of the air, the vicissitudes of the seasons, the beating of the
rains, the force of flowing water, the dash of the inconstant sea, and
other natural agencies, crumble down, wear away, or are torn
asunder into fragments of every size. These either remain where they
are formed, or are carried by winds and moving waters to distances,
sometimes very great, but which are dependent on the force of the
wind or water which impel them, and on the size or density of the
fragments themselves. Thus are our shores daily worn away by the
action of the sea, and the fragments distributed along its bottom by
the tides and currents; and thus, from the far northern mountains of
America, does the Missouri bring down detached fragments
thousands of miles into the Gulf of Mexico, whence the Gulf Stream
carries them even to the icy Spitzbergen.
Fourth, That over all the solid rocks, almost everywhere is spread a
covering of this loose, and, for the most part, drifted matter,
consisting of sands, gravels, and clays. These overspread not only
valleys and plains, but hill-sides and slopes, and sometimes even
mountain-tops, to a greater or less depth. There are comparatively
few spots where these loose materials do not cover and conceal the
native rocks; but in some localities, and especially in wide plains and
deep river valleys, they are sometimes met with in accumulations of
enormous depth. In our own island, a depth of two hundred feet of
such superficial sands, gravels, and clays, is by no means unusual.
They are often sorted into beds alternately coarse and fine, evidently
by the action of moving water; and while the great bulk of the
fragments of which our English gravels consist can generally be
traced to native rocks at no great distance from the spots on which
they rest, yet among them are to be found fragments also, which
must have been brought from Norway, and other places, many
hundred miles distant.
On the surface of these drifted masses we generally live, and from
the soils they form we extract by tillage the means of life.
Fifth, That these, occasionally thick, beds of drifted matter—drift
we shall for brevity call it—are in some places cut through by existing
rivers, the beds of which run between high banks of clay, sand, or
gravel, which the action of the stream has gradually worn and
washed away. This is seen in many of our own river valleys; and it is
especially visible along the great rivers of North America. The effect
of this wearing action is to remove, mix up, and redistribute, towards
the river’s mouth, the materials which have been scooped out by the
cutting water, and thus to produce, on a small scale, along the river’s
bed, what had long before been done in the large, when the entire
bed of drift through which the river flows was itself spread over the
plain or valley by more mighty waters.
These things being understood, a very wide geological examination
of gold-bearing localities has shown—
First, That gold rarely occurs in available quantity in any of the
stratified rocks, except in those which belong to the primary or oldest
group, and in these only when or where they have been, more or less,
disturbed or altered by ancient volcanic or volcanic-like action; by
the intrusion, for example into cracks and hollows, of veins and
masses of serpentine, granite, syenite, and other igneous rocks, in a
melted or semi-fluid state.
Second, That among these primary stratified rocks a subdivision,
to which the name of Silurian was given by Sir Roderick Murchison,
has hitherto, as a whole, proved by far the richest in this kind of
mineral wealth; though the slate-rocks below, and the sandstones
and limestones above, in favourable circumstances, maybe equally
gold-bearing.
Third, That the drifted sands and gravels, in which gold-washing is
profitable, occur only in the proximity, more or less near, of such
ancient and altered (so called metamorphic) rocks. They are, in fact,
the fragments of such rocks broken up, pounded, and borne to their
present sites by natural causes, operating long ages ago, but similar
in kind to those which now degrade and carry away to lower levels
the crumbling particles still torn off from our hardest mountains by
the ceaseless tooth of time.
Numerous as have been the deposits of gold found in various ages
and countries, they all confirm the general geological conclusions
above stated. The main and most abundant sources of gold which
were known to the ancients, occurred among the sands of rivers, and
amid the gravels and shingles which formed their banks. Such were
the gold-washings in the beds of the Phasis, the Pactolus, the Po, the
Douro, the Tagus, and the mountain streams which descended from
the alpine heights of Greece, of Italy, of America, of Asia Minor, and
of many other countries. These rivers all descend from, or, early on
their way, pass through or among, ancient rocks, generally old and
altered Silurian strata, such as those we have spoken of, in which the
gold originally existed, and from which the existing rivers, since they
assumed their present channels, have in some few cases, and to a
small amount, separated and brought it down. And if in any region,
as in Nubia, Hungary, Bohemia, and Macedonia,[6] the ancient or
mediæval nations followed up their search to the sources of the rich
rivers, and were successful in finding and extracting gold from the
native rocks, later explorations, wherever made, have shown that
these mines were situated among old and disturbed deposits of the
primary and Silurian age.
The more modern discoveries in America, Siberia, and elsewhere,
prove the same. So that, among geologists, it is at present received as
an established fact, that the primary, the so called azoic and
palæozoic rocks, are the only great repositories of native gold.
There are no known laws, either physical or chemical, by which the
almost exclusive presence of gold in these ancient rocks can be
accounted for or explained. A conjecture has been hazarded,
however, to which we shall for a moment advert.
From the fissures and openings which abound in volcanic
neighbourhoods, gases and vapours are now seen continually to
arise. Whatever is capable of being volatilised—driven off in vapour,
that is—by the existing heat, rises from beneath till it reaches the
open air, or some comparatively cool spot below the surface, where it
condenses and remains. Such was the case also in what we may call
the primary days of geology.
Gold is one of the few metals which occur, for the most part, in the
native or metallic and malleable state. But in this state it is not
volatile, and could not have been driven up in vapour by ancient
subterranean heat. But, as in the case of many other metals, the
prevailing belief is, that it has been so volatilised—not in the metallic
state, however, but in some form of chemical combination in which it
is capable of being volatilised. No such combinations are yet known,
though their existence is not inconsistent with—may in fact be
inferred from—our actual knowledge.
It is further supposed that, at the period when the primary rocks
were disturbed by intrusions of granites, porphyries, serpentines,
greenstones, &c., which we have spoken of as volcanic-like
phenomena, the elementary bodies, which, by their union with the
gold, are capable of rendering it volatile, happened to exist more
abundantly than at the period of any of those other disturbances by
which the secondary and tertiary rocks were affected; and that this is
the reason why signs of gold-bearing exhalations, and consequently
gold-bearing veins, are rare in the rocks of the newer epochs.
According to this view of the introduction of gold into the fissures
and veins of the earliest rocks, its presence is due to what we may call
the fortuitous and concurrent presence in the under crust of other
elementary substances along with the gold, which by uniting with it
could make it volatile, rather than to the action or influence of any
widely-operating chemical or physical law. The explanation itself,
however, it will be remembered, is merely conjectural, and, we may
add, neither satisfactory nor free from grave objections.
But from the geological facts we have above stated, several very
interesting consequences follow, such as—
First, That wherever the rocks we have mentioned occur, and
altered as we have described, the existence and discovery of gold are
rendered probable. Physical conditions may not be equally
propitious everywhere. Broad valleys and favourable river channels
may not always coexist with primary rocks traversed by old volcanic
disturbances; or the ancient sands and shingles with which the
particles of abraded gold were originally mixed may, by equally
ancient currents, have been scoured out of existing valleys, and
swept far away. But these are matters of only secondary
consideration, to be ascertained by that personal exploration which a
previous knowledge of the geological structure will justify and
encourage.
Whenever the geology of a new country becomes known, therefore,
it becomes possible to predict the presence or absence of native gold,
in available quantities, with such a degree of probability as to make
public research a national, if not an individual duty. This led Sir
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Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction

Contemporary British Drama 1st Edition David Lane

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Bentley 1st Edition R. C. Jebb

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This series provides accessible yet provocative introductions to a wide range of

Edinburgh Critical Guides

CONTEMPORARY BRITISH FICTION

Nick Bentley is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature at Keele University. He

Edinburgh University Press

Forthcoming Titles in the Series:

Edinburgh University Press

© Nick Bentley, 2008

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

Typeset in 11.5/13 Monotype Ehrhardt

ISBN 978 0 7486 2419 5 (hardback)

The right of Nick Bentley

Series Preface vii

Chapter 1 Narrative Forms:

Chapter 2 Writing Contemporary Ethnicities 65

Chapter 3 Gender and Sexuality 96

Chapter 4 History, Memory and Writing 128

Chapter 5 Narratives of Cultural Space 160

Student Resources 198

The study of English literature in the early twenty-ﬁrst century is

Date Historical and Cultural Publication of Novels

Date Historical and Cultural Publication of Novels

1979 ‘Winter of Discontent’; Angela Carter, The Bloody

Date Historical and Cultural Publication of Novels

1986 Wapping Print Workers’ Kingsley Amis, The Old

1987 Conservatives re-elected; V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma

1988 Reform of the Education Doris Lessing, The Fifth

1989 The Fall of the Berlin Wall; Martin Amis, London

1990 ‘Poll Tax’ in England and A. S. Byatt, Possession: A

Date Historical and Cultural Publication of Novels

1991 ‘First’ Gulf War; end of Martin Amis, Time’s

Date Historical and Cultural Publication of Novels

Date Historical and Cultural Publication of Novels

2002 US and British troops invade Will Self, Dorian; Sarah

HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL CONTEXTS 1975‒2005

his book is an introduction to British ﬁction written in the last

to be called ‘contemporary’ has to do with the way in which litera-

determines the way in which their work is read. Salman Rushdie,

unembarrassed spectacle of conspicuous consumption in certain

representing the centre ground. Culturally, however, there was a

present in ‘The Tavern in the Town’, one of the pubs targeted,

The ideological divisions of the 1980s and early 1990s represented by

and upper relies heavily on social and economic theories developed

GENDER AND SEXUALITY

In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, a text

whole basis of Western language and philosophy has been based on

idea of women’s equality. Many male writers began to explore the

sixties onwards that have, due in no small part to the eﬀorts of

POSTCOLONIALISM, MULTICULTURALISM AND