The last hundred years...stylistic refinements
The last hundred years has been a time of great change in the realm of fiction writing. The Victorian style novels (Dickens, Henry James etc) with their vast screeds of exposition has been replaced with a more succinct form where subtlety and or ambiguity reign.
It is generally held that the arrival on the literary scene of Ernest Hemingway (with his first collection of stories "In Our Time" in 1924) heralded the changing of the guard and a radical rethink of the way we read and write fiction. At about the same time, James Joyce published "Ulysses" which was a novel whose essence was loaded in symbolism, both explicit and implicit. Though Hemingway and Joyce were polar opposites in style in the twenties, together they revolutionised literature (along with Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, John dos Passos etc.)
I would posit that most stylistic changes since the time of Hemingway could be read as variations of the changes wrought in the twenties, rather than complete departures. For e.g; Raymond Carver's 'stone cold' narrative voice that gained such acclaim in the 70s-80s was really a super succinct version of Hemingway's style. The abstract, experimental novels of someone like John Barth owed much to the earlier experiments by Woolf and Faulkner.
So where is writing now? Where are we headed?
Your thoughts please.
Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you - Maori proverb
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Re: The last hundred years...stylistic refinements
I'd say that post-modernist literature (especially) owes a nod to the 'Beat' writers, mainly Burroughs and perhaps the poetry of Allen Ginsberg. It's not coincidental that those writers, plus Kerouac and Ken Kesey were more popular in the 90s than in any other time since their original era.
Burroughs pastiche stream-of-consciousness style itself owed something to writers of the past (Joyce, Virginia Woolf, John dos Passos - perhaps even Nabakov) and to artists from other mediums (Jackson Pollock and perhaps Joan Miro for instance.)
The Beat writers issued a challenge to literature as a whole, probably beyond the impact their actual writing made. For one thing, the Beat writers were probably the most personal of writers since Hemingway (in terms of using their work as autobiographical explorations) which is a baton taken up by many writers of the last 25 years. They also tackled what they saw as the falseness and artiface of modern living and modern values and consumer society, also modern western society's proclivity to squeeze 'ideas' out of mainstream thought. Another writer to do this, to devastating effect (though he was not a 'Beat' writer) was Albert Camus.
Of the beat writers themselves, perhaps Ken Kesey had the most to say to literature, in terms of the writing itself, but I'd say Burroughs and Kerouac have had more influence on 'fashion.'
Incidentally; did you know that Ken Kesey (who died recently) always refused to see the film version of "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest," as he believed that Jack Nicholson was "totally wrong" for the part of McMurphy. Having enjoyed both the book and the film I wouldn't say Nicholson was miscast - he brought the role off brilliantly.
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