ABSTRACT
Most literary-historical accounts of novels become accounts of ‘the novel’ - a search for lines of development, a tradition, a stream, a progression, its ‘rise’, its ‘turn’, its ‘death’. This is as true of post-war fiction as it is of the English novel as a whole. Initially ‘the post-war novel’ was a ‘reaction against experiment’; the novels and pronouncements of Snow, Amis, Wain, Angus Wilson, Braine and Sillitoe were variously presented in evidence. This is now discredited, partly because it became clear that there was not much to react against (such inter-war novelists as Waugh, Greene, Orwell and Isherwood clearly prefigured the styles and concerns of the post-war ‘reactionaries’) and partly because the sixties produced much writing that did not fit the model (by John Fowles, B. S.Johnson, Doris Lessing and others). Indeed, the reaction against the ‘reaction’ model has been so strong that more recent accounts such as Bergonzi's The Situation of the Novel (1970) and Bradbury and Palmer's The Contemporary English Novel (1979) have tended to sweep some novelists (Wain, Storey, Sillitoe) entirely off the map. Attention has tended to refocus either around ‘postmodernism’ or simply on the general fact of fictional self-consciousness - ‘the novel now, with its shifted range of possibilities … is in a general ferment’. 1
