ABSTRACT

Trying to identify the defining characteristics of any period of literary history is a difficult task, especially when the period under question is close to us. However, even from our relatively short distance from the 1990s, it is possible to begin to map out some of the dominant trends within the fiction of the period. Two things can be said with relative certainty: first, that the period is one of healthy production of narrative fiction seen by the vast number of novels produced in Britain during the past decade or so and fuelled by the rise of the literary-prize culture (Todd 1996). As Jago Morrison has argued, the novel of the 1980s and 1990s has fully recovered from the fears of its ‘death’ and ‘end’ in the decades immediately following the end of the Second World War (Morrison 2003: 3-4). The second main characteristic of 1990s fiction is its sheer diversity. Examples of novels can be identified that address issues of provincialism and globalization, multiculturalism and specific national and regional identities, experimentation and a reengagement with a realist tradition, as well as renewed and reinvigorated interest in a range of differing and overlapping identities: nation, gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality and even the post-human.