British Fiction of the 1990s

257 Pages·2005·1.55 MB·English

by  Nick Bentley

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Edited by
Nick Bentley

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British Fiction of the 1990s
The 1990s proved to be a particularly rich and fascinating period for British
fiction. This book provides a fresh perspective on the diverse writings that
appeared during the decade, bringing together leading academics in the
field in order to:
• Trace the concerns that emerged as central to 1990s fiction, in sections
on millennial anxieties, identity politics, the relationship between the
contemporary and the historical, and representations of contemporary
space;
• Offer distinctive new readings of the most important novelists of the
period, including Martin Amis, Beryl Bainbridge, Pat Barker, Julian
Barnes, A. S. Byatt, Hanif Kureishi, Ian McEwan, Iain Sinclair, Zadie
Smith and Jeanette Winterson;
• Show how British fiction engages with major cultural debates of the
1990s, such as the concern with representing various identities and
cultural groups, or theories of ‘the end of history’;
• Discuss 1990s fiction in relation to broader literary and critical theories,
including postmodernism, post-feminism and post-colonialism.

Together the essays highlight the ways in which the writing of the 1990s
represents a development of the themes and styles of the post-war novel
generally, yet displays a range of characteristics distinct to the decade. British
Fiction of the 1990s is essential reading for those working in the field of recent
fiction or studying any of the authors discussed.
Nick Bentley is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature at Keele
University and also an Associate Lecturer for the Open University.

British Fiction of
the 1990s
Edited by Nick Bentley
First published 2005
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
© 2005 Editorial matter and selection Nick Bentley
Individual contributions © 2005 the contributors
Typeset in Baskerville by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
British fiction of the 1990s / edited by Nick Bentley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
Contents: Introduction : mapping the millennium : themes and trends in
contemporary British fiction / Nick Bentley – From excess to new world
order / Fred Botting – “Refugees from time”: history, death and the flight
from reality in contemporary writing / Andrzej Gasiorek – Science and
fiction in the 1990s / Patricia Waugh – British science fiction in the 1990s :
politics and genre / Roger Luckhurst – The McReal thing : personal/
national identity in Julian Barnes’s England, England / Sarah Henstra

– Cyberspace and the body : Jeanette Winterson’s The.powerbook / Sonya
Andermahr – “Fascinating violation” : Ian McEwan’s children / Peter
Childs – “Tongues of bone” : A.L. Kennedy and the problems of
articulation / Helen Stoddart – Mr Wroe’s virgins : the “other Victorians”
and recent fiction / B.E. Maidment – Pat Barker’s vanishing boundaries /
Lynda Prescott – Singular events : the “as if” of Beryl Bainbridge’s Every
man for himself / Fiona Becket – Iain Sinclair’s millennial fiction : the
example of slow chocolate autopsy / Julian Wolfreys – Hedgemony?
surburban space in the buddha of surburbia / Susan Brook – Iain Sinclair :
the psychotic geographer treads the borderlines / Peter Brooker.
1. English fiction–20th century–History and citicism. I. Bentley, Nick.
PR881.B7235 2005
823’.91409–dc22.
2005002575
ISBN 0–415–34256–2 (hbk)
ISBN 0–415–34257–0 (pbk)
Contents
Notes on contributors vii
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction: mapping the millennium: themes and
trends in contemporary British fiction 1
NICK BENTLEY
PART I
Millennial anxieties 19
1 From excess to the new world order 21
FRED BOTTING
2 ‘Refugees from time’: history, death and the flight
from reality in contemporary writing 42
ANDRZEJ GA˛SIOREK
3 Science and fiction in the 1990s 57

PATRICIA WAUGH
4 British science fiction in the 1990s: politics and genre 78
ROGER LUCKHURST
PART II
Identity at the fin de siècle 93
5 The McReal thing: personal/national identity in
Julian Barnes’s England, England 95
SARAH HENSTRA
vi Contents
6 Cyberspace and the body: Jeanette Winterson’s
The.PowerBook 108
SONYA ANDERMAHR
7 ‘Fascinating violation’: Ian McEwan’s children 123
PETER CHILDS
8 ‘Tongues of bone’: A. L. Kennedy and the
problems of articulation 135
HELEN STODDART
PART III
Historical fictions 151
9 Mr Wroe’s Virgins: the ‘other Victorians’ and
recent fiction 153
B. E. MAIDMENT
10 Pat Barker’s vanishing boundaries 167
LYNDA PRESCOTT
11 Singular events: the ‘as if’ of Beryl Bainbridge’s
Every Man for Himself 179
FIONA BECKET
PART IV
Narrative geographies 193
12 Iain Sinclair’s millennial fiction: the example of
Slow Chocola te Autopsy 195
JULIAN WOLFREYS
13 Hedgemony? Suburban space in The Buddha of
Suburbia 209
SUSAN BROOK
14 Iain Sinclair: the psychotic geographer treads the
border-lines 226
PETER BROOKER
Index 238
Contributors
Sonya Andermahr is Senior Lecturer in English and women’s studies in
the School of Arts at University College Northampton. Her publications
include A Glossary of Feminist Theory (Edward Arnold, 1997), co-authored
with Terry Lovell and Carol Wolkowitz, and Straight Studies Modified:
lesbian interventions in the academy (Cassell, 1997), co-edited with Gabriele
Griffin. She has also published work on Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet,
Sarah Schulman’s Empathy and women’s science fiction.
Fiona Becket is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Leeds
University. Her publications include D. H. Lawrence: the thinker as poet
(Macmillan, 1997), Ireland in Proximity: history, gender, space, edited with
Scott Brewster, Virginia Crossman and David Alderson (Routledge,
1999), and The Complete Critical Guide to D. H. Lawrence (Routledge, 2002).
Nick Bentley is Lecturer in twentieth-century literature at Keele Uni-
versity and also an Associate Lecturer for the Open University. His
main research areas are in post-1950 British literature and literary
theory. He has published articles on Sam Selvon, Julian Barnes and
Zadie Smith, and on subcultural fictions of the 1950s: Richard Hoggart,

Stuart Hall and Colin MacInnes. He is currently working on a book
on British fiction and culture of the 1950s and on a monograph on
Martin Amis.
Fred Botting is Director of the Institute for Cultural Research at Lancaster
University. His research interests are in Romantic and Gothic writing,
contemporary fiction and literary theory. His publications include Making
Monstrous: Frankenstein, criticism, theory (Manchester University Press, 1991),
Gothic (Routledge, 1996), Sex, Machines and Navels: fiction, fantasy and history
in the future present (Manchester University Press, 1999), Bataille (Palgrave,
2001), Tarantinian Ethics (Sage, 2001) and Essays and Studies: the Gothic (D. S.
Brewer, 2001). He is also co-editor of Gothic: critical and cultural concepts,
viii Contributors
(Routledge, 2004) and has a monograph nearing completion on Gothic
(post)modernities, romance, consumption and technology.
Susan Brook is Assistant Professor in twentieth-century British literature
at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. She did her Ph.D. at Duke
University (2001), and has also taught at the University of Manchester
and at Staffordshire University. Her research interests lie in post-war and
contemporary British literature and cultural studies, and in feminist and
gender theory. Her book, Angry Young Men, Women and the New Left: literature
and cultural criticism in the fifties, is forthcoming from Palgrave in 2006. She is
currently writing an introduction to post-war literature and culture for
Continuum and is also working on a new project on representations of
suburbs across a range of media in twentieth-century Britain.
Peter Brooker is Professor of literary and cultural studies in the Post-
graduate School of Critical Theory and Cultural Studies at the Uni-
versity of Nottingham. His publications include Bertolt Brecht: dialectics,
poetry, politics (Croom Helm, 1988), New York Fictions: modernity, postmodern-
ism, the new modern (Longman, 1996), and A Glossary of Cultural Theory
(Arnold, 1999). He is also editor of Modernism/Postmodernism (Longman,
1992). His book, Modernity and Metropolis (Palgrave, 2002), contains an
extensive discussion of Iain Sinclair’s works of the 1990s. His most recent
book is Bohemia in London: the scene of early modernism (Palgrave, 2004).
Peter Childs is Professor in English at the University of Gloucestershire.
His books include An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory (Harvester,
1996), co-authored with Patrick Williams, The Twentieth Century in Poetry
(Routledge, 1998), Modernism, New Critical Idiom Series (Routledge,
2000), Reading Fiction: opening the text (Palgrave, 2001). His most recent
publication is Contemporary Novelists: British fiction 1970–2000 (Palgrave,
2005).

Andrzej Ga˛siorek is Senior Lecturer in English at Birmingham Uni-
versity, specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. His
doctoral thesis explored the nature of experimental fiction in post-war
Britain and was published as Post-War British Fiction: realism and after
(Edward Arnold, 1995). The main focus of his research over the past five
years has been literary modernism, and he has published a book on
Wyndham Lewis for the Writers and their Work series, which appeared in
2002. He has recently completed two further books: a monograph on
J. G. Ballard, forthcoming in 2005 in the new Contemporary British
Novelists series published by Manchester University Press, and a collec-
tion of essays titled T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism, co-edited with
Edward J. Comentale, forthcoming in 2005 and published by Ashgate.
Contributors ix
Sarah Henstra is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of California at
Irvine. She has published articles on Angela Carter, Katherine Mansfield,
Djuna Barnes and Doris Lessing. She is now completing a book entitled
Solicited Voices: the interview in art and life, which theorizes the ‘genre’ of the
interview across various literary, political and pop-cultural contexts.
Roger Luckhurst lectures in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature
at Birkbeck College. He is the author of “The Angle Between Two Walls”: the
fiction of J. G. Ballard (Liverpool University Press, 1997) and The Invention
of Telepathy (Oxford University Press, 2002). He has co-edited Literature
and the Contemporary: fictions and theories of the present (Longman, 1999), The
Fin de Siècle: a reader in cultural history, c.1880–1900 (Oxford University
Press, 2000) and Transactions and Encounters: science and culture in the Victorian
era (Manchester University Press, 2002). He co-edited ‘Remembering the
1990s’, a special issue of New Formations for 2003, and his most recent
book is Science Fiction (Polity Press, 2005).
B. E. Maidment is Professor of English in the School of English, Soci-
ology, Politics and Contemporary History at the University of Salford.
His research interests include mass-circulation and popular literature of
the nineteenth century, especially periodicals and graphic images, writ-
ing by Victorian working men and women, including regional writing,
Ruskin and Victorian publishing history. He is the author of Reading
Popular Prints 1780–1870 (Manchester University Press, 1996).
Lynda Prescott is Senior Lecturer in literature and Staff Tutor in arts
at the Open University. She has also taught at the universities of
Bradford and Nottingham. Her publications include Open University
teaching materials on Conrad, Kipling and Pat Barker as well as
articles on Bernard Shaw, V. S. Naipaul and J. G. Farrell. Current
projects include a study of the travel writings of Graham Greene and
Evelyn Waugh.
Helen Stoddart is Lecturer in English at Keele University. She has
research interests in the Gothic and in the history, representation and
influence of the modern circus. Her study of the modern circus, Rings of
Desire: circus history and representation (Manchester University Press, 2000)
gives a particular emphasis to the use of circus representations and
metaphors in film and literary fiction. Currently, she is working on a
book-length study of Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, to be published
in 2005. She has contributed to a number of edited collections and
published articles in the Modern Language Review, the Glasgow Review and
Screen and is also on the editorial board of Continuum: Journal of Media and
Cultural Studies.