routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

526 The twentieth century: 1945 to the present
to this group, such as William Boyd and Salman Rushdie, were also
raised outside the United Kingdom, and Julian Barnes has set his novels
in countries as diverse as France and Bulgaria. This echoes the sense of
an enlarging world, an ever-growing internationalism, which emerged
in writing at the end of the nineteenth century, when ‘outsiders’ like
Shaw and Conrad began to make their mark on English literature.
The decline of the British Empke had been a subject for fiction
since Kipling: E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India is arguably the major
novel on the theme in the first half of the century. The novels of Paul
Scott, from Johnnie Sahib (1952) to The Raj Quartet (The Jewel in the
Crown, 1966; The Day of the Scorpion, 1968; The Towers of Silence, 1971,
and A Division of the Spoils, 1975), take the concern with India up to and
beyond independence: Staying On (1977) is almost a requiem for the
colonial era, seen through the eyes of survivors of its modern decline.
The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) by J.G. Farrell was, like Staying On, a
major prizewinner. It is a detailed historical reconstruction of the events
of the Indian Mutiny and it was followed by The Singapore Grip (1978)
which analysed another of the fatal blows to the British Empire, the fall
of Singapore to the Japanese in the Second World War.
J.G. Ballard, one of the widest ranging of modern novelists, exploring
science fiction, urban nightmare, and memories of childhood in his
many novels, similarly handles the fall of Shanghai to the Japanese, as
witnessed by a young boy in The Empire of the Sun (1984). This takes
Farrell’s historical documentation further, making the boy’s experience
almost a rite of passage of the century: history becomes personal, as it
has continued to do in the writing of the new generation.
‘INSIDERS’ FROM ‘OUTSIDE’
The present wave of ‘outsiders’, or non-Anglo-Saxon writers, covers a
wide range of themes, but many share a concern with how the past
has influenced and continues to influence the present.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) examines loyalties,
mistaken or otherwise, between the upper classes and a servant in the
1930s, and his A Pale View of Hills (1982) brings Japan into English
literature in an examination of the post-war consciousness of guilt.
From an Anglo-Chinese background, Timothy Mo examines cross-