routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

The mid-century novel
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1920s to 1940s share. Its opening line has become almost proverbial:
‘The past is another country. They do things differently there.’
Part of the nostalgic recall of ‘golden’ or mythical days after the
Second World War led to the success of Laurie Lee’s autobiographical
account of his country childhood in Cider With Rosie (1959). This was
one of the consistently biggest-selling books of the last decades of the
century, largely because of its arcadian ideal of golden summers and
happy innocence, long since lost. A further volume of memories – As
I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) – takes the author off
to the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s; and the golden days are
gone for ever, except in written memoirs.
After 1945, Christopher Isherwood (like W.H. Auden) remained an
American citizen. His writing, like Aldous Huxley’s, came to be
influenced by Eastern thinking, as exemplified in Vedanta for the
Western World (1945). Isherwood persisted with a semiautobiographical
strain in his writings, which might usefully be termed
‘auto-fiction’: from the pre-war Lions and Shadows (1938), to Down
There on a Visit (1962), A Single Man (1964), and the directly
autobiographical, openly gay, Christopher and His Kind (1977).
With Angus Wilson, several strands of the late twentieth-century novel
meet. An academic, he wrote about personal relationships in the upper
middle classes with a range of characters, often in middle age, who try
to balance the conflicting demands of the world they live in: the wild
and the tame, the past and the present, conformity and difference – he
takes particular care to integrate homosexual characters into his fictional
landscapes. Wilson is a writer of satiric wit and sharp social observation.
He looks back to Dickens, and gives the novel in the second half of the
twentieth century some of its most carefully constructed and richly
layered investigations of the human comedy. Hemlock and After (1952)
was his first novel, followed by Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956), The Middle
Age of Mrs Eliot (1958) and No Laughing Matter (1967), all contributing
to his growing reputation over the following three decades. No Laughing
Matter is perhaps his most ambitious novel, moving between parody
and realistic family saga, exploring narrative techniques and psychological
nuances in an intricate tapestry. Setting the World on Fire dates from
1980. As a critic, Wilson wrote studies of Dickens and Kipling, and a
significant examination of English writing and his own creative processes,
in The Wild Garden (1963).