Since 1970 the association between history and fiction, already underlined in the first issue, has undoubtedly continued, and has even considerably progressed. Historians themselves are turning more and more to the techniques of fiction. It is a strategy that respects the freedom of readers who, knowing more than one version of history, can make their own choice about which is most likely to be nearer the truth. Similarly, by founding a fiction on a recognisable basis of historically-based reality, the relevance of a novel to aspects of the life of the readers can also be enhanced.

Contemporary readers, on the other hand, are no longer surprised by the active part they are expected to play in the ‘writing game,’ as David Lodge put it, and the warning the publisher had to include on the front cover of the 1970 edition of The French Lieutenant’s Woman to account for the repetition of the same episode in two different chapters of the novel, is now no longer needed! It might however be difficult to assert, as John Bailey did in the 1983 issue of Études Anglaises, that “the modern novel [of the period] only pleased the reviewers” (Bonnerot 1983, 130). The twenty-first-century novelist certainly knows, as Graham Greene already did, that it is quite possible to reach a very wide audience that includes both the average readers and most of the literary critics.

In her introduction to the 1980-1995 period (133), Luce Bonnerot wrote that the novelists of the time belonged to no specific school and were all individual voices, even if the term of postmodernism could apply to some of them. It seems that this would not really be contradicted by the writers of the twenty-first century, even if the classification still continues to irritate both critics and authors, just as modernism, the angry young men or “le nouveau roman” did in their time: labels never fit or please! Nothing new there.

The blurring of frontiers between genres has also developed even further over the period. It has become an established feature in the postmodernist experience and it sometimes seems that authors now want to follow as many forking paths as possible in their Borgesian literary gardens. Thus in Ghost Story (2004), Toby Litt has put together a clinically realistic autobiographical text from his diary about his partner’s three miscarriages, two animal short stories (“The Hare” and “Foxes”) where fantasy replaces realism, and a Jamesian novel that inspired the title of the hybrid book as a whole. It remains for the reader to connect the various pieces of the puzzle.

Never has L. P. Hartley’s “Past as a foreign country where things are done differently” been truer, and literature in the making seems to imply a frequent return to the Past and on the way it has been delegated to us to be transmitted to the following generations. As Catherine Bernard puts it in this volume: “contemporary fiction invents itself in a complex narcissistic work of art recalling/mourning/exorcising in which the present obsessively returns to the past even as it attempts to wrench itself free from it.” This omnipresent re-reading of the Past in our complex relation to memory includes more and more intertextual and palimpsestic texts, epigraphs, parodies, transpositions and pastiches: all stimulation for the reader’s pleasure of recognition. It also accounts for the essential part played by photographs (Graham Swift, Penelope Lively), paintings (Peter Ackroyd, Iain Pears) and of fictitious nineteenth-century journals (Sarah Waters, Peter Hobbs). Swift’s frequent use of the concept of “coming to terms” with one’s personal and collective past could really apply to many of the themes of most contemporary novelists quoted in this volume, including Ian McEwan’s attempt to revisit his past as a writer in Atonement (2001) through his “conversation with modernism” (Pedot).

But the new specificity of this re-telling of the Past “with a difference” is undoubtedly the multiplication of retro-Victorian or Edwardian novels (Gutleben). Neo-Victorianism as a nostalgic imitation of works of the Past, whether seen negatively (Guignery) as reactionary, as a homage (Lanone), or as a subversive device calling attention to the artifice of the period, certainly is a literary phenomenon to be taken into account (Gutleben). The list of neo-Victorians would be very long and would include, among many others, David Lodge, Peter Ackroyd, Alasdair Gray, Beryl Bainbridge, A. S. Byatt, Patricia Duncker, Jeanette Winterson, Will Self, Sarah Waters and Peter Hobbs.

There are also other ways of remembering the Past, not necessarily as obvious. Thus, according to George Letissier, when Alan Hollinghurst advocates the “homosexualization of the novel,” he remains a writer of the tradition, following a “curved line of continuity”—a variation on the serpentine Hogarthian Line of Beauty.” As for Pat Barker, she lays bare the mechanisms of the Past by “showing the alternative repressed history and the devices of our literary imagination” (Bernard), and Zadie Smith places On Beauty (2005) “under the unexpected aegis of the Edwardian novelist E. M. Forster” (Lanone).

One of the reasons for this insisting revival of the nineteenth century that seems to delight the contemporary reader was analysed in depth by David Lodge in an interview on 13th January 2005:

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At the time of the popular success of the various forms of docudramas, reality and fiction seem to have become an almost indivisible couple, and Norman Mailer’s “faction” encapsulates the reader’s need to identify with the fictitious world of the novel even if this fear of pure fiction may possibly be seen as a tendency not to develop one’s imagination to its extreme. Now is the time for a new generation of “books with an uncertain generic status, oscillating between the historical novel and the biography,” as Vanessa Guignery puts it. Biographical novels like David Lodge’s Author, Author (2004), Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004), and Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) and Arthur and George (2005). Those hybrid novels often include real and made-up documents ‘pour faire vrai’ and introduce real personalities into their cast of characters. It also seems that several contemporary novels choose medical science or treatment to connect fiction to reality: electric shocks to treat aphasia in Pat Barker’s Regeneration (1991), the effects of De Clérambault’s syndrome in McEwan’s Enduring Love (1997), cloning in Ishiguro’s Never Let me Go (2005) and the use of artificial insemination in Swift’s Tomorrow (2007).

When asked what extra dimension fiction could add when compared to documents, testimonies, pamphlets or historical essays, André Brink very convincingly answered that in fiction “the involvement with the fullness of human experience embeds it in the totality of the reader’s mind, memory, dreams, imagination and perception of the world” (76).

Even if metafiction and textual experimentation as a whole now seem to be used with relative moderation, many narrative situations still leave sufficient space to whet the appetite of both readers and critics. Thus Iain Pears in The Portrait (2005) introduces a complete monologue delivered by a painter talking to an art critic while painting his porttait—the model never uttering a single word. In Graham Swift’s Tomorrow (2007), the narrative situation is certainly unique: Paula mentally addresses her two twins Nick and Kate asleep in the next room while her husband is sleeping next to her. In Slow Man (2005) by J.M. Coetzee, a character from another of his novels—the fictitious writer Elizabeth Costello—suddenly invades the narrative. As for the pseudo-Woolfian or Joycian ‘one-day novel,’ it seems to be here to stay: most of Swift’s novels including Tomorrow which is told in one single night and Ian McEwan’s first part of Atonement (2001) that takes place “one fateful hot summer day in 1935.”

Many novelists heralded as young ‘new comers’ have confirmed their talent and are now safely considered as classics: Julian Barnes, Peter Ackroyd, Alan Hollinghurst, Hanif Kureishi, Kazuo Ishiguro, Graham Swift, Salman Rushdie and Jeanette Winterson, thus proving—if needed—that it is indeed quite possible to do scientific research in depth on contemporary authors without taking too many risks (see Catherine Bernard and François Gallix, “Petit plaidoyer pour la littérature contemporaine”). The contemporary trend of listmania and of creating literary prizes, may seem another marketing device for the book trade but it remains true that the Granta classification every ten years published since 1983 has not proved wrong, neither have the following ones in 1993 and 2003, which went as far as including Monica Ali and Adam Thirwell only after reading their books in manuscript form! Most of those “no longer new comers” have now embarked on new writing strategies, often giving new shades of meaning to postmodernism, and have thus reached a second stage in their literary careers. Catherine Pesso-Miquel considers Graham Swift’s evolution from Waterland (1983) to Tomorrow (2007) as moving “from a postmodernist stance to a more subdued straightforward conception of the novel as story-telling.” With Author, Author (2004), David Lodge is “experimenting with a hybrid form which marks a new departure in his method of writing” (Guignery) and in Atonement (2001), Ian McEwan used “the modernist intertext as a pretext for self-examination inseparable from a rewriting of his earlier works” (Pedot).

Literature in the making and works in progress fortunately know no closure and rather imply seemingly endless new paths to be followed by readers and scholars for the pleasure of both.