ABSTRACT
For several decades after the end of the Second World War, the novel appeared to be dead. As a vehicle for literary experimentation, on the one hand, it had been taken to the limits by modernists like Joyce, Woolf and Beckett. And, on the other hand, beset by the mass media of film, television and computers, book fiction could not hope to survive as a form of entertainment. For many commentators in the 1960s, fiction’s fate seemed sealed. In 1962 the American theorist Marshall McLuhan caught the mood of many with his study The Gutenberg Galaxy, arguing that new electronic media were the future for human communication. The printed book itself, with its conformity, linearity and traditions of elitism, was about to be made obsolete by the technologies of a new, postliterate age.
