Sara Martín Alegre P08/04540/02135

b)
How does the narrator feel about the coincidence in time of his birth and the birth
of India as an independent nation?
c)
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay, but lives in England and writes in English. In
your opinion, can we say that 
Midnight's Children
is an English novel?

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© FUOC
• P08/04540/02135
14
Post-War English Literature 1945-1990
2. The English Novel 1945-1990
The history of the post-war novel in English, and also that of drama and
poetry, cannot be understood without reference to the coexistence in the
first half of the twentieth century of Modernism and the more traditional
approaches to literature inherited from the Victorian period.
The Modernist writers reacted against realism in fiction and the remains of
Romantic sentimentalism in poetry by introducing technical innovations that
could be used to look at reality from the point of view of the irrational, the
subconscious, the anti-sentimental, or the highly individualistic. In drama,
the revolution followed other lines, with G. B. Shaw's introduction to the
English stage of the naturalistic drama developed by Ibsen. Modernism can be
said to enter the English stage precisely at the time of Shaw's death in 1950,
when Samuel Beckett's plays challenged the hegemony of naturalism and the
artificial, well-made play.
After 1945, when novelists faced the task of explaining the new historical
reality and the position of the individual in the new post-war order, most
realized that this entailed making a choice between traditional literary
models that seemed more suitable for transmitting an accurate portrait of the
individual in a changing society, and experimental, Modernist models that
seemed more suitable for explaining the disjunction between the individual
consciousness and the problematic flow of contemporary history.
Post-modernism was born out of this dilemma.