ABSTRACT
In an important way, the ‘death of the novel’ thesis of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s reflects an anxiety in that period about the possibility of adequately addressing contemporary historical concerns in fiction. The scale of violence in the Second World War, the Nazi genocide, the atom bombing of Japan and, after them, the paranoiac politics of the Cold War – with a global nuclear conflagration held in suspense only by the promise of ‘mutually assured destruction’ – all of this seemed to have rendered fiction too flimsy a medium for history. Indeed, as early in the post-war period as 1946, in his essay ‘The Future of Fiction’, the British writer V. S. Pritchett was already warning that the capacities of the novel had been overcome by the events of recent times. Writers, by their very disorientation, had ‘become the historian(s) of the crisis in civilization’. In subsequent decades, concerns have turned to the resurgence of nationalisms and racisms in multiple forms around the globe, and the apocalyptic stand-offs of the Cold War superpowers have already faded from the surface of collective memory. What has not faded from the minds of writers, however, is the problem of framing contemporary history in fiction.
