Introduction: Last Things First

Abstract ‘1960–2000: The Last of England?’ Surely England is more durable than that title suggests? It certainly still seemed so, twenty years before this period began, even at the height of the Second World War. ‘Worlds may change and go awry’, Ross Parker and Hughie Charles warned in their popular wartime song, only to reaffirm that ‘there’ll always be an England’. Such confidence is not necessarily contradicted in this volume of the Oxford English Literary History— not entirely, at any rate. ‘The Last of England’ of its title is in one way less doom-laden than simply descriptive, referring to the last or most recently produced literature in England: the last phase of the millennium-long tradition the History describes. Yet no study of the later twentieth century, doom-laden or not, could overlook how far sureties failed, even in the brief gap between the end of the war and 1960.