Epilogue

Abstract

The readings explored in the previous chapters constitute a recuperative project, which seeks to reassess the importance of social and ethical concerns explored within contemporary British fiction, to acknowledge a new understanding of British fiction’s relationship to postmodernism made available through changing literary and literary critical paradigms, and to recognise the central importance of these writers’ fictions in carving out a new post-consensus and post-millennial literary agenda. As James F. English remarks, in part due to the emergence of a global corporate literary market and prize culture, but also on account of this writing’s own critical orientation, ‘postwar British fiction had never actually been contemporary until now; it had finally, in the 1980s, managed to assert its contemporaneity, which seemed also to mean its worldliness, its recognition of and within a global literary geography’ (English, 2006, p. 2). Likewise, the readings I offer in this book emphasise this emerging global context, and with it the possibility of a cosmopolitan world vision explored through fiction, expressed (at least in part) as a localised understanding of globalism’s impact upon contemporary knowledge and ethics, which looks beyond the ideological limitations of what Ulrich Beck terms ‘methodological nationalism’ (Beck, 2006, pp. 2, 3, 5, 24), even while recognising the nation’s value as a necessary framework for implementing cosmopolitan ideals.

Brief sections of this Epilogue have been published previously in Horton (2011). I am grateful to East-West Cultural Passage for allowing me to republish this material here.