The outbreak of war in 1939, as in 1914, brought to an end an era of great intellectual and creative exuberance. Individuals were dispersed; the rationing of paper affected the production of magazines and books; and the poem and the short story, convenient forms for men under arms, became the favored means of literary expression. It was hardly a time for new beginnings, although the poets of the New Apocalypse movement produced three anthologies (1940–45) inspired by Neoromantic anarchism. No important new novelists or playwrights appeared. In fact, the best fiction about wartime—Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags (1942), Henry Green’s Caught (1943), James Hanley’s No Directions (1943), Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude (1947), and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1949)—was produced by established writers. Only three new poets (all of whom died on active service) showed promise: Alun Lewis, Sidney Keyes, and Keith Douglas, the latter the most gifted and distinctive, whose eerily detached accounts of the battlefield revealed a poet of potential greatness. Lewis’s haunting short stories about the lives of officers and enlisted men are also works of very great accomplishment.

It was a poet of an earlier generation, T.S. Eliot, who produced in his Four Quartets (1935–42; published as a whole, 1943) the masterpiece of the war. Reflecting upon language, time, and history, he searched, in the three quartets written during the war, for moral and religious significance in the midst of destruction and strove to counter the spirit of nationalism inevitably present in a nation at war. The creativity that had seemed to end with the tortured religious poetry and verse drama of the 1920s and ’30s had a rich and extraordinary late flowering as Eliot concerned himself, on the scale of The Waste Land but in a very different manner and mood, with the well-being of the society in which he lived.

Fiction

The two most innovatory novelists to begin their careers soon after World War II were also religious believers—William Golding and Muriel Spark. In novels of poetic compactness, they frequently return to the notion of original sin—the idea that, in Golding’s words, “man produces evil as a bee produces honey.” Concentrating on small communities, Spark and Golding transfigure them into microcosms. Allegory and symbol set wide resonances quivering, so that short books make large statements. In Golding’s first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), schoolboys cast away on a Pacific island during a nuclear war reenact humanity’s fall from grace as their relationships degenerate from innocent camaraderie to totalitarian butchery. In Spark’s satiric comedy, similar assumptions and techniques are discernible. Her best-known novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), for example, makes events in a 1930s Edinburgh classroom replicate in miniature the rise of fascism in Europe. In form and atmosphere, Lord of the Flies has affinities with George Orwell’s examinations of totalitarian nightmare, the fable Animal Farm (1945) and the novel Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). Spark’s astringent portrayal of behavior in confined little worlds is partly indebted to Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett, who, from the 1920s to the 1970s, produced a remarkable series of fierce but decorous novels, written almost entirely in mordantly witty dialogue, that dramatize tyranny and power struggles in secluded late-Victorian households.

The stylized novels of Henry Green, such as Concluding (1948) and Nothing (1950), also seem to be precursors of the terse, compressed fiction that Spark and Golding brought to such distinction. This kind of fiction, it was argued by Iris Murdoch, a philosopher as well as a novelist, ran antiliberal risks in its preference for allegory, pattern, and symbol over the social capaciousness and realistic rendition of character at which the great 19th-century novels excelled. Murdoch’s own fiction, typically engaged with themes of goodness, authenticity, selfishness, and altruism, oscillates between these two modes of writing. A Severed Head (1961) is the most incisive and entertaining of her elaborately artificial works; The Bell (1958) best achieves the psychological and emotional complexity she found so valuable in classic 19th-century fiction.

While restricting themselves to socially limited canvases, novelists such as Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, and Barbara Pym continued the tradition of depicting emotional and psychological nuance that Murdoch felt was dangerously neglected in mid-20th-century novels. In contrast to their wry comedies of sense and sensibility and to the packed parables of Golding and Spark was yet another type of fiction, produced by a group of writers who became known as the Angry Young Men. From authors such as John Braine, John Wain (also a notable poet), Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, and David Storey (also a significant dramatist) came a spate of novels often ruggedly autobiographical in origin and near documentary in approach. The predominant subject of these books was social mobility, usually from the northern working class to the southern middle class. Social mobility was also inspected, from an upper-class vantage point, in Anthony Powell’s 12-novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–75), an attempt to apply the French novelist Marcel Proust’s mix of irony, melancholy, meditativeness, and social detail to a chronicle of class and cultural shifts in England from World War I to the 1960s. Satiric watchfulness of social change was also the specialty of Kingsley Amis, whose deriding of the reactionary and pompous in his first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), led to his being labeled an Angry Young Man. As Amis grew older, though, his irascibility vehemently swiveled toward left-wing and progressive targets, and he established himself as a Tory satirist in the vein of Waugh or Powell. Essayist and novelist Colin MacInnes was among the first observers to to chronicle both the Black immigrant experience in England and the advent of the teenager and youth culture, most notably in his trilogy of London novels, City of Spades (1957), Absolute Beginners (1959), and Mr. Love and Justice (1960).C.P. Snow’s earnest 11-novel sequence, Strangers and Brothers (1940–70), about a man’s journey from the provincial lower classes to London’s “corridors of power,” had its admirers. But the most inspired fictional cavalcade of social and cultural life in 20th-century Britain was Angus Wilson’s No Laughing Matter (1967), a book that set a triumphant seal on his progress from a writer of acidic short stories to a major novelist whose work unites 19th-century breadth and gusto with 20th-century formal versatility and experiment.

The parody and pastiche that Wilson brilliantly deploys in No Laughing Matter and the book’s fascination with the sources and resources of creativity constitute a rich, imaginative response to what had become a mood of growing self-consciousness in fiction. Thoughtfulness about the form of the novel and relationships between past and present fiction showed itself most stimulatingly in the works—generally campus novels—of the academically based novelists Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge.

From the late 1960s onward, the outstanding trend in fiction was enthrallment with empire. The first phase of this focused on imperial disillusion and dissolution. In his vast, detailed Raj Quartet (The Jewel in the Crown [1966], The Day of the Scorpion [1968], The Towers of Silence [1971], and A Division of the Spoils [1975]), Paul Scott charted the last years of the British in India; he followed it with Staying On (1977), a poignant comedy about those who remained after independence. Three half-satiric, half-elegiac novels by J.G. Farrell (Troubles [1970], The Siege of Krishnapur [1973], and The Singapore Grip [1978]) likewise spotlighted imperial discomfiture. Then, in the 1980s, postcolonial voices made themselves audible. Salman Rushdie’s crowded comic saga about the generation born as Indian independence dawned, Midnight’s Children (1981), boisterously mingles material from Eastern fable, Hindu myth, Islamic lore, Bombay cinema, cartoon strips, advertising billboards, and Latin American magic realism. (Such eclecticism, sometimes called “postmodern,” also showed itself in other kinds of fiction in the 1980s. Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters [1989], for example, inventively mixes fact and fantasy, reportage, art criticism, autobiography, parable, and pastiche in its working of fictional variations on the Noah’s Ark myth.) For Rushdie, as Shame (1983), The Satanic Verses (1988), The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), and The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) further demonstrate, stylistic miscellaneousness—a way of writing that exhibits the vitalizing effects of cultural cross-fertilization—is especially suited to conveying postcolonial experience. (The Satanic Verses was understood differently in the Islamic world, to the extent that the Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa, in effect a death sentence [later suspended], on Rushdie.) However, not all postcolonial authors followed Rushdie’s example. Vikram Seth’s massive novel about India after independence, A Suitable Boy (1993), is a prodigious feat of realism, resembling 19th-century masterpieces in its combination of social breadth and emotional and psychological depth.

Nor was India alone in inspiring vigorous postcolonial writing. Timothy Mo’s novels report on colonial predicaments in East Asia with a political acumen reminiscent of Joseph Conrad. Particularly notable is An Insular Possession (1986), which vividly harks back to the founding of Hong Kong. Kazuo Ishiguro’s spare, refined novel An Artist of the Floating World (1986) records how a painter’s life and work became insidiously coarsened by the imperialistic ethos of 1930s Japan. Novelists such as Buchi Emecheta and Ben Okri wrote of postcolonial Africa, as did V.S. Naipaul in his most ambitious novel, A Bend in the River (1979). Naipaul also chronicled aftermaths of empire around the globe and particularly in his native Caribbean. Nearer England, the strife in Northern Ireland provoked fictional response, among which the bleak, graceful novels and short stories of William Trevor and Bernard MacLaverty stand out.

Widening social divides in 1980s Britain were also registered in fiction, sometimes in works that purposefully imitate the Victorian “Condition of England” novel (the best is David Lodge’s elegant, ironic Nice Work [1988]). The most thoroughgoing of such “Two Nations” panoramas of an England cleft by regional gulfs and gross inequities between rich and poor is Margaret Drabble’s The Radiant Way (1987). With less documentary substantiality, Martin Amis’s novels, angled somewhere between scabrous relish and satiric disgust, offer prose that has the lurid energy of a strobe light playing over vistas of urban sleaze, greed, and debasement. Money (1984) is the most effectively focused of his books.

Just as some postcolonial novelists used myth, magic, and fable as a stylistic throwing-off of what they considered the alien supremacy of Anglo-Saxon realistic fiction, so numerous feminist novelists took to Gothic, fairy tale, and fantasy as countereffects to the “patriarchal discourse” of rationality, logic, and linear narrative. The most gifted exponent of this kind of writing, which sought immediate access to the realm of the subconscious, was Angela Carter, whose exotic and erotic imagination unrolled most eerily and resplendently in her short-story collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979). Jeanette Winterson also wrote in this vein. Having distinguished herself earlier in a realistic mode, as did authors such as Drabble and Pat Barker, Doris Lessing published a sequence of science fiction novels about issues of gender and colonialism, Canopus in Argos—Archives (1979–83).

Typically, though, fiction in the 1980s and ’90s was not futuristic but retrospective. As the end of the century approached, an urge to look back—at starting points, previous eras, fictional prototypes—was widely evident. The historical novel enjoyed an exceptional heyday. One of its outstanding practitioners was Barry Unsworth, the settings of whose works range from the Ottoman Empire (Pascali’s Island [1980], The Rage of the Vulture [1982]) to Venice in its imperial prime and its decadence (Stone Virgin [1985]) and northern England in the 14th century (Morality Play [1995]). Patrick O’Brian attracted an ardent following with his series of meticulously researched novels about naval life during the Napoleonic era, a 20-book sequence starting with Master and Commander (1969) and ending with Blue at the Mizzen (1999). Beryl Bainbridge, who began her fiction career as a writer of quirky black comedies about northern provincial life, turned her attention to Victorian and Edwardian misadventures: The Birthday Boys (1991) retraces Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed expedition to the South Pole; Every Man for Himself (1996) accompanies the Titanic as it steamed toward disaster; and Master Georgie (1998) revisits the Crimean War.

Many novels juxtaposed a present-day narrative with one set in the past. A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) did so with particular intelligence. It also made extensive use of period pastiche, another enthusiasm of novelists toward the end of the 20th century. Adam Thorpe’s striking first novel, Ulverton (1992), records the 300-year history of a fictional village in the styles of different epochs. Golding’s veteran fiction career came to a bravura conclusion with a trilogy whose story is told by an early 19th-century narrator (To the Ends of the Earth [1991]; published separately as Rites of Passage [1980], Close Quarters [1987], and Fire Down Below [1989]). In addition to the interest in remote and recent history, a concern with tracing aftereffects became dominatingly present in fiction. Most subtly and powerfully exhibiting this, Ian McEwan—who came to notice in the 1970s as an unnervingly emotionless observer of contemporary decadence—grew into imaginative maturity with novels set largely in Berlin in the 1950s (The Innocent [1990]) and in Europe in 1946 (Black Dogs [1992]). These novels’ scenes set in the 1990s are haunted by what McEwan perceives as the continuing repercussions of World War II. These repercussions are also felt in Last Orders (1996), a masterpiece of quiet authenticity by Graham Swift, a novelist who, since his acclaimed Waterland (1983), showed himself to be acutely responsive to the atmosphere of retrospect and of concern with the consequences of the past that suffused English fiction as the second millennium neared.