Literature of the 1980s: After the Watershed Volume 9

The 1980s were a time of tumultuous transition in Britain. While the Cold War was ending, Margaret Thatcher's government reinvented the postwar consensus of Britain's social landscape. This wide-ranging study follows such developments across fiction, poetry, and drama, as well as other cultural forms, such as television, film, and music. It maps changes in society while also paying close attention to literary forms and textures that, by the end of the decade, left Britain a very different place. Specifically, the volume describes the impact of a new generation of London novelists and the affect of feminism, postmodernism, literary theory, working-class reactions to Thatcherism, black British writing, and reflexive and self-conscious modes of writing. Writers discussed include Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Salman Rushdie, James Kelman, Fred D'Aguiar, Grace Nichols, and Alan Hollinghurst.

Joseph Brooker is Reader in Modern Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of Joyce's Critics (2004) and Flann O'Brien (2005).