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’.