Flattening the literary landscape

Despite the title, this is not one of those gloom-mongering surveys of the state of culture that so regularly (usually at the end of a decade) predict the Death of the Novel, the End of History, the Death of the Individual, and the like. Indeed, on closer inspection, ‘The Last of England’ turns out to mean only ‘the last volume, for the present, in this particular series of the Oxford English Literary History’, bringing us up from 1960 to the millennium. Still, it nevertheless managed to monger a certain mild gloom in me.

My chief complaint is that it does not make the period exciting enough. On internal evidence, I must be much the same age as Stevenson, first becoming thrilled by modern poetry and the theatre in the Seventies. And goodness, it was thrilling. I saw Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream three times, queuing all day for returns (and remember, as a star-struck 14-year-old, being dazzled by Ian McKellen as Richard II and Edward II, and reading in a teen-mag the qualities McKellen announced he was on the look-out for in his ‘dream woman’. Now that really does date me.)

If Stevenson does not recapture or even evoke those thrills, this is not because he is too critical of the period, but because he is not critical enough. Brook’s Dream was pure theatrical magic, yet spawned endless, pretentious imitations; the fascinating, possibly unanswerable question is why it was so good while the others were just embarrassing. And the problem with Stevenson’s account is that it flattens all movements into one approved (or dis- approved) collective. Feminist rewritings of patriarchal myths were indeed once exciting and radical; in Stevenson’s account of the novel, all are such a self- evidently Good Thing that they are accorded equal status, regardless of which were freshest, subtlest or most truly imaginative.