Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The state and the novel: The post-war wilderness
The testing of liberal humanism
The sixties and social revolution
The post-consensus novel
Intimations of social collapse
After Thatcher
2. Class and social change: 'The movement'
Anger and working-class fiction
Education and class loyalty
The formal challenge of class
The waning of class consciousness
The rise of the middle class
The rise of the underclass
The realignment of the middle class
The role of the intellectual
3. Gender and sexual identity: Out of the bird-cage
Second-wave feminism
Post-feminism
Repression in gay fiction
4. National identity: Reinventing Englishness
The colonial legacy
The Troubles
Irishness extended
Welsh resistance
The 'Possible Dance' of Scottishness
Beyond the Isles?
5. Multicultural personae: Jewish-British writing
The empire within
'Windrush' and after: dislocation confronted
The quest for a settlement
Ethnic identity and literary form
Putting down roots
Rushdie's broken mirror
Towards post-nationalism
6. Country and suburbia: The death of the nature novel
The re-evaluation of pastoral
The post-pastoral novel
The country and the city
Trouble in suburbia
Embracing the suburban experience
7. Beyond 2000: Realism and experimentalism
Technology and the new science
Towards the new confessional
The fallacy of the new
A broken truth: Murdoch and morality
Notes
Bibliography.

Dominic Head demonstrates how the novel yields a special insight into important areas of social and cultural history in the second half of the twentieth-century. His study is the most exhaustive survey of post-war British fiction available. Placing novels in their social and historical context, it includes chapters on the state and the novel, class and social change, gender and sexual identity, national identity, and multiculturalism. Accessible and wide-ranging, this is the most current introduction to the subject available.