Dominic Head is Reader in Contemporary Literature and Head of the School of English at the University of Central England. He is the author of The Modernist Short Story (Cambridge, 1992), Nadine Gordimer (Cambridge, 1994), J. M. Coetzee (Cambridge, 1997).
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The state and the novel: The post-war wilderness
The testing of liberal humanism
The sixties and social revolution
The post-consensus novel
Intimations of social collapse
After Thatcher
2. Class and social change: 'The movement'
Anger and working-class fiction
Education and class loyalty
The formal challenge of class
The waning of class consciousness
The rise of the middle class
The rise of the underclass
The realignment of the middle class
The role of the intellectual
3. Gender and sexual identity: Out of the bird-cage
Second-wave feminism
Post-feminism
Repression in gay fiction
4. National identity: Reinventing Englishness
The colonial legacy
The Troubles
Irishness extended
Welsh resistance
The 'Possible Dance' of Scottishness
Beyond the Isles?
5. Multicultural personae: Jewish-British writing
The empire within
'Windrush' and after: dislocation confronted
The quest for a settlement
Ethnic identity and literary form
Putting down roots
Rushdie's broken mirror
Towards post-nationalism
6. Country and suburbia: The death of the nature novel
The re-evaluation of pastoral
The post-pastoral novel
The country and the city
Trouble in suburbia
Embracing the suburban experience
7. Beyond 2000: Realism and experimentalism
Technology and the new science
Towards the new confessional
The fallacy of the new
A broken truth: Murdoch and morality
Notes
Bibliography.
