THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

handcuffed in a very different way. Rushdie is, however, far from alone in his awareness of how a non-European
cultural awareness can shift the sometimes narrow temporal and intellectual perspectives of
[p. 639]
European, and specifically British, literature. Timothy Mo, born in Hong Kong in 1950 of an English mother and a
Cantonese father, has deftly described the closed, protective, alienated, and opportunistic society of the London
Chinese in Sour Sweet (1983). More ambitiously, in the panoramic An Insular Possession (1986), he has attempted to
explore the beginnings of Hong Kong as a British trading colony following the so-called ‘Opium War’ of 1839-42.
Quite distinct, and far less easily characterized as ‘post-colonial’, is the work of the Japanese-born Kazuo Ishiguro (b.
1954) whose novel An Artist of the Floating World (1986) is a delicate fictional study of an ageing painter's awareness
of, and detachment from, the political and cultural development of twentieth-century Japan. When Ishiguro writes
directly about Britain, as he does in The Remains of the Day (1989), he manages to ask equally delicate, carefully
framed, but none the less demanding cultural questions.
In speaking of the British and Irish literature of the past forty-five years it is clear that it remains dominated by the
historical and social changes wrought by the Second World War and by the period of external decolonization and
internal reconsideration that followed. If one single decade seemed at the time to matter more than any other, it was,
of course, the 1960s. Whether or not that decade will in future seem remarkable for the literature it produced, rather
than simply for the changes in popular culture and popular awareness that it witnessed, will be for the future to judge.
Its political events and non-events are already part of history. It is, however, with one quintessentially 1960s voice
that it seems appropriate to end. It also seems proper to let one unequivocally American voice comment on a period in
which an English-speaking American culture has seemed to be more dominant than that emanating from the Englishspeaking
off shore islands of Europe. But, as Bob Dylan insists in his lyric ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’, all
judgements on who and what we are at present must remain relative:
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.
[end of Chapter 10]
[Andrew SANDERS: The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1994]
[p. 641]
CHRONOLOGY
EVENTS LITERARY WORKS
450
597
Traditional date of the coming of the
‘Saxons’ to England
St Augustine’s mission arrives in Kent
735 Death of Bede
c. 720
731
Lindisfarne Gsopels
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the
English People