Wars Waged With/Against Joyce: James Joyce and Post-1984 British Fiction

Abstract

More than twenty-five years ago now, in 1987, Morton Levitt’s authoritative account on the presence/absence of Joyce within post-war British letters painted this rather bleak picture:

With [B.S.] Johnson’s death Britain has lost its sole significant novelist who had been influenced by Joyce from the start and had proudly proclaimed and demonstrated that influence from the start, the one serious novelist of his generation who had been fearless of ‘experiment’ and of being linked with the Modernists, the creator of a developing canon who almost alone in the land had shown promise of further and challenging development. […] But the Neo-Victorian novel of Britain, in the third decade now of its dominance, appears to live on, its critics, practitioners and audience still unaware, it would seem, that it was stillborn.¹