Angus Wilson's Critical Writings

Abstract

literary history of the post-war period. Since Wilson is more than anyone else the exemplary English novelist of the contemporary period his fictional texts are documents essential to the study of the novel in Britain over the past three and a half decades. The same is true of his critical writings, in which Wilson has always been concerned, explicitly or implicitly, to relate his subjects to contemporary circumstances and contemporary needs. This concern was most directly expressed in the criticism Wilson wrote during the 1950s. The background to these early pieces is his diagnosis of the moribund state of English fiction in the immediate post-war years, a subject he addressed in a Letter from London sent to the American Mercury in December of 1951: The great key theme of English fiction since the War has been nostalgia. Deep sensitivity to the atmosphere of places and shades in personal relationships, careful evocation by image,