ABSTRACT
For some of us, there was a curious bifurcation of the experience of literary culture in the 1990s. Cultural theory often adopted an apocalyptic tone, and proclaimed the end of history, the end of the subject, or, in Jean Baudrillard’s case, the end of the end. Postmodernism stubbornly survived its origins in the 1980s and many ratcheted up the rhetoric of cultural pessimism. No more political art. The exhaustion of the avant-garde. In Sven Birkets’ view, new digital technologies prophesied the end of Literature and its mode of civilised acculturation through reading. These discussions filtered into angst on the literary pages about the decline or death of the English novel: was Martin Amis, along with his teeth, finished? Could we confess that Salman Rushdie was writing terrible books yet? Was Zadie Smith the saviour of the tradition or an empty emblem of multiculturalism? Yet at the same time as these enervating debates there was a remarkable renaissance going on elsewhere, in different kinds of genre writing. Detective fiction, fantasy, Gothic, horror and science fiction entered phases of extraordinary vitality in the 1990s, all the more striking for being surrounded by the language of entropic decline and millennial gloom.
