The Post-War novel in Crisis: Three perspectives

Abstract

The most obvious difference between nineteenth-century novels and twentieth-century novels is that the nineteenth-century ones are better. (Iris Murdoch, 1970) … the warmth, the compassion, the humanity, the love of people which illuminates the literature of the nineteenth century and which makes all these old novels a statement of faith in man himself … are qualities which I believe are lacking from literature now. (Doris Lessing, 1957)