by Emily Horton
My fellow editors, Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson, and I are very pleased to announce the publication of our new collection, The 1980s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2014). The volume is one of a larger sequence of titles, The Decades Series, which emerges out of a succession of workshops hosted by the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing (BCCW) at Brunel University, and which aims to explore contemporary British fiction in relation to the cultural, aesthetic and ideological dynamics of its particular decade of publication. Each volume in the series works with a common structure, beginning with an introduction and a ‘Literary History of the Decade’, followed by two ‘Special Topic’ chapters, a chapter on ‘Postcolonial Voices’, followed by ‘Historical Representations’, ‘Experimental Writing’, and up to two on ‘International Contexts’, the latter considering British fiction’s reception in other national academic settings. The series editors are Nick Hubble, Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson, and as well as a 1970s volume already in print, other forthcoming volumes will feature the 1990s, and the 2000s.
In the 1980s volume, we explore British writing in relation to a decade which represented a sea change in British society, politics and culture, calling to attention in particular the radical alterations to government and life introduced by the figure of Margaret Thatcher and by the populist conservative political ideology of Thatcherism. Our claim, presented in the introduction, is that British ‘writers and critics resisted her ethos often using satire and parody to question this’, while also, somewhat paradoxically, participating in a host of changes introduced to literary publishing and the commercial market more generally which contributed to the increasing popularity of ‘literary fiction’ but also, more problematically, to the possible complicity of authors in the new cultural economy of prize culture writing. This topic is one which I take up in further detail in my chapter ‘Literary History of the Decade’, considering especially how ‘prize cultures’ complicity with corporate transnational networks’ functioned to prioritise ‘criteria of stylistic spectacle’ as the basis of literary success. The introduction also considers a host of new postcolonial and Black British voices in 1980s British fiction, which in part accompany a shift in critical thinking towards poststructuralist, postmodernist, and postcolonial concerns – these bywords themselves each seeking to lay claim to new writing in order to validate and clarify their specific critical outlooks.
The two ‘Special Topic’ chapters of the volume focus respectively on ‘Scottish Literature in the 1980s’ (Monica Germanà) and a more concentrated discussion of ‘Thatcherism and British Fiction’ (Joseph Brooker). In the former, Germanà considers the connections between Scottish Nationalism, Thatcherism and 1980s Scottish literature, taking into key consideration the literary effects of the unsuccessful devolution referendum of 1979 and the emergence of both realist and fantastic aesthetics seeking to interrogate ‘the alienated identity and marginal belonging of the Scottish self within Thatcherite Britain and an increasingly globalized political system.’ On a related note, Brooker, in his chapter, explores the ‘Art of Bad Government’ associated with Thatcherite politics, and connectedly the various, overwhelmingly negative responses offered by authors to the Iron Lady, which nevertheless seemed to appropriate some of the liveliness introduced by her figure. As Brooker puts it, ‘If Thatcherism indeed amounted to a large-scale change and social drama, then one might find writers feeding off it and channelling its energies, even as they sought to criticize many of its effects.’ Referring in detail to Alasdair Gray, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Emma Tennant and Ian McEwan, this chapter offers a detailed and compelling account of this context and of the political critique pursued by 1980s writing.
The chapter on ‘Postcolonial and Diasporic Voice’, by Susan Alice Fischer, concentrates on ‘“Black” British Women’s Fiction and Literary Institutions in the 1980s’, exploring significant aesthetic and ideological innovations in Black British women’s writing which were supported by a range of new Black feminist institutions established during this decade. These organizations, she argues, sought to challenge mainstream publishing houses and distribution centres previously inattentive to African, Caribbean and Asian British voices but also tied to a largely patriarchal prioritization of British men’s writing. Such often overlooked writers as Barbara Burford, Ravinder Randhawa, Beryl Gilroy, Jackie Kay, Bernadine Everisto, Buchi Emecheta and Joan Riley are just a handful of those to emerge confidently during this period and to offer a unique perspective on Black British women’s struggles and achievements during a quickly changing and uncertain contemporary era.
Alex Murray’s chapter on ‘Historical Representations’, and Frederick M. Holmes’ on ‘Generic Discontinuities and Variations’, likewise each offer distinct and original contributions to this field of study. In Murray’s chapter, he contemplates the newly emergent ‘heritage industry’ of the 1980s, questioning to what extent 1980s fiction concerned with the topic of history, or tied to the genre of ‘historiographic metafiction’, might be seen as taking part in, rather than questioning, a popular conservative historical nostalgia. Bearing in mind contemporaneous critics of the heritage industry, such as Robert Hewison, Patrick Wright, and Neal Acherson, he argues that heritage culture became pervasive within 1980s British life and literature, though certain writers, such as Michael Moorcock and Iain Sinclair, were able to resist co-option. Holmes’ chapter, by contrast, focuses more broadly on ‘Innovations in Form and Technique in British Fiction of the 1980s’, exploring how new postmodernist experiments responded to a sense of crisis of authority emergent during this era, reinventing established genre traditions and literary styles in new and subversive ways. As he puts it, ‘Even as the writers undermine the ontological solidity and totalizing power of their own discourses, they establish their own artistic credentials as postmodernists.’
Lastly, the two closing chapters on ‘International Contexts’, the first in relation to North America and the second Europe, offer insightful reflections on ‘American Reception of British Fiction in the 1980s’ (Brian Finney) and on ‘The Romanian Context: Between Realism and Postmodernism’ (Ana-Karina Schneider). In the former chapter, Finney investigates American reviewers and critics’ particular concern with literary postmodernism and with the anxiety that British writers in different ways remained outside this critical/aesthetic category. Considering in particular such prominent literary figures as Angela Carter, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Salman Rushdie, he argues that ‘American reviewers initially failed to fully recognize the stature of these British novels’, even while they ‘have slowly become part of the canon taught at American universities and kept in print by US publishers’. He puts this down to ‘a misreading of elements such as irony, comic convention and the use of British vernacular or specifically British cultural material not so well understood by American readers’ but also to ‘a preference that American readers, students and reviewers show for works of fiction from their own country.’ In this way, despite a shared language, it appears that literary tastes and concerns remained in many ways separate between the US and Britain during this decade.
By contrast, Schneider comments in her chapter on how very important British fiction became to Romanian readers of this period, though notably it was not the same fiction prized by 1980s British readers. Thus, the fiction of Iris Murdoch and John Fowles, in many ways superseded in British reviews and criticism by younger writers such as Carter, Amis, McEwan and Rushdie, and hovering between realism and postmodernism rather than fully embracing either position, became the special interest of Romanian literary scholarship. As Schneider explains, ‘To Romanian readers in the 1980s . . . they epitomized the current realism-experimentalism dichotomy: their ambivalent situation vis-à-vis postmodernism enabled interpretations that were sites where theories of representation played themselves out and were tested.’ In other words, these writers’ hesitancy about the merits of postmodernism, and continued concern for the value of authenticity, made them especially attractive to a Romanian critical readership, where under the increasing oppression of the communist regime, authorities condemned 1980s experimentalism as elitist and reactionary.
In summary, The 1980s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction offers a wide-ranging and multi-voiced retrospective on British writing of this period, one of the most turbulent and politically significant of the contemporary era. In addition to the contributed chapters, the book also includes timelines of works, as well as national and international events, and a collection of biographies of prominent writers, all of which endeavour to encompass this varied context and writing in more precise detail.
Emily Horton is a visiting lecturer at Brunel University and is co-editor, with Monica Germanà, of Ali Smith: Contemporary Critical Perspectives.
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