BTAN23000
POSTWAR BRITISH FICTION AND FILM
Autumn term 2008
Bényei Tamás
Proposed schedule (rather than a syllabus, this is a list of topics to be covered in the lectures).
Additional information about examination topics, as well as lists of films and books are provided in
separate files.
1. The production of British fiction and film (material and ideological conditions, cultural
background, the publishing and filmmaking industries)
2. The ethos of the English novel; the gender of the English novel (novel of manners, novel of
sensibility, the condition-of-England novel, novel sequences: Angus Wilson, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth
Bowen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Rosamond Lehmann, Anthony Powell)
3. The war and after: Nostalgia and dystopia in postwar fiction and film (the representation of
WW2, the cold war, myths of Englishness; Orwell, Tolkien, James Bond and spy fiction; the Ealing
comedies)
4. The 1950s: realism and fantasy in fiction and film (the angry young men  Kingsley Amis, John
Braine, John Wain  and other fifties writers/film-makers; Carol Reed’s The Third Man, the films of
Powell and Pressburger, David Lean’s Brief Encounter) The “mainstream” of Postwar fiction (Iris
Murdoch, William Golding, Muriel Spark, Anthony Burgess, Anthony Powell)
5. The nineteen-sixties (the “swinging sixties”; the New Wave in film  Lindsay Anderson, Tony
Richardson, Karel Reisz ; avantgarde fiction  B. S. Johnson, Ann Quin ; the birth of youth cultures)
6. The nineteen-eighties: Thatcherism and British culture (the response of film and fiction to
Thatcherism; Chariots of Fire; The Last of England; Brassed Off; Derek Jarman, Neil Jordan, Peter
Greenaway, Ken Russell, Nicholas Roeg, Terence Davies, etc.; Ian McEwan, Iain Sinclair, Toby Litt,
Jonathan Coe, etc.)
7. Postmodernism, avantgarde, metafiction (Beckett, B. S. Johnson, Martin Amis, Peter Ackroyd,
Julian Barnes, etc.)
8. Feminist fictions (Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Fay Weldon, Emma Tennant,
Anita Brookner, A. S. Byatt, Marina Warner, Kate Atkinson, Sarah Waters, etc; the films of Sally
Potter)
9. Postcolonialism and multiculturalism in fiction and film; diaspora fiction and film (Salman
Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Timothy Mo, Caryl Phillips, Ben Okri, Zadie Smith, Hanif
Kureishi, Hari Kunzru, Monica Ali, the films of Kureishi and Frears: My Beautiful Laundrette, East Is
East, Anita and Me)
10. Historical fiction and heritage cinema (John Fowles, Paul Scott, J. G. Farrell, Graham Swift,
Timothy Mo, Kazuo Ishiguro, Lawrence Norfolk, Adam Thorpe, David Lean’s Passage to India, the
Merchant-Ivory heritage industry (Howard’s End, A Room with a View, Elizabeth)
11. The Scottish renaissance in fiction and film (James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, Janice Galloway, A.
L. Kennedy, Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, Iain Banks, the films of Danny Boyle Shallow Grave and
Trainspotting, Lynne Ramsay)
12. The 1990s and after: cultural crisis, gender crisis (Jim Crace, Pat Barker, Will Self, Esther Freud,
Tim Parks, Matt Thorne, “chicklit,” Helen Fielding, Meera Syal, “ladlit,” Nick Hornby, “football
fiction,” the films of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, The Full Monty, Billy Elliot, My Name’s Joe, Lock,
Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Late Night Shopping, Mad Cows, etc.)
13. Popular fictions (fantasy, crime, science fiction, romance)