Reconceptualisation of realism in British postwar fiction: the cases of Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark ve John Fowles

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2011

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Mete, Barış

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This study is about British postwar fiction and its canonical reception according to a special categorisation of the novelists who were publishing in Britain during the two decades after the end of the Second World War. The study emphasises that mainstream literary criticism of 1950s and ’60s Britain tended to catalogue the novelists of this period according to a well-established dichotomy between tradition and innovation in which the traditional realist novels, the neorealist works of C. P. Snow, Angus Wilson and Kingsley Amis, were privileged over any other fictional work having modernist innovative characteristics. Therefore, the first published novels of Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and John Fowles, novelists belonging to today’s postmodern canon, were first critically recognised as social realist works in Britain. One of the objects of this study is to demonstrate the shortcomings of this classification. Moreover, the main argument of the study is that none of these three novelists should have been classified as a traditional realist novelist. All of these three British postwar novelists were reconceptualising traditional realism by self-reflexively including the problem of representation as part of their conventional subject matters in their formal realist novels.

Subject Keywords

English literature, English literature

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http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12613417/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/20634

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Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

B. Mete, “Reconceptualisation of realism in British postwar fiction: the cases of Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark ve John Fowles,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2011.