routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

Contexts and conditions
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There is a veritable explosion of expression around the question of the
atomic bomb, around the possibility that all life could end at a moment’s
notice. Each decade, as the century moves towards its close, has had a
distinct and different feeling: the 1950s were the age of austerity; the
1960s, the age of youth; the 1970s, an age of anxiety; the 1980s, an age
of new materialism; the 1990s, an age of recession and preoccupation.
For the novelist A.S. Byatt, there is, throughout this time, a new
richness and diversity in English writing, a continuing of the search for
a post-Darwinian security in creativity: ‘A wonderful mix of realism,
romance, fable, satire, parody, play with form and philosophical
intelligence.’ Byatt notes an ‘almost obsessive recurrence of Darwin in
modern fiction’. Where nineteenth-century writers – novelists in particular
– wrote about the ending of certainty, especially religious certainty, late
twentieth-century writers have largely concerned themselves with (again
according to Byatt) ‘what it means to be a naked animal, evolved over
unimaginable centuries, with a history constructed by beliefs which
have lost their power’. This is a useful perception of the common themes
underlying much of modern writing, and indeed much of the Modern
or post-Modern perception of the world we live in.
Where Modern was a keyword for the first part of the twentieth
century, the term post-Modern has been widely used to describe the
attitudes and creative production which followed the Second World
War. Post-Modernism almost defies definition. Rather, it celebrates
diversity, eclecticism, and parody in all forms of art, from architecture
to cinema, from music to literature. All the forms which represent
experience are mediated, transformed, and the ‘truth’ of experience
thus becomes even more varied than it has ever been before.
The mix of ‘post-Darwin’ and post-Modern is indicative of the binary
linking of traditional and new elements in literature: the subject matter
is still, essentially, the human condition, but the means and methods
of exploring it are infinitely richer and more varied than ever before.
There are no more heroes, as there might have been in the time of
Beowulf. There is the individual; solitary, responsible for his or her
own destiny, yet powerless when set against the ineluctable forces of
the universe. This is one of the basic conflicts of the post-Modern
condition, and one which gives rise to the immense variety of