A portrait of the artist manque: Form and failure in the British novel since 1945

Appearing in places as diverse as a pickle factory in Bombay (Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children) and a nylon textiles factory in Peckham Rye (Muriel Spark's The Ballad of Peckham Rye), the figure of the failed artist populates the pages of the British novel since 1945. This dissertation thus explores the role of the artist manque in the development of postwar British fiction. The Kunstlerroman (or artist novel) emerges as a catalyst form for the novel after 1945, as novelists expand the parameters of this literary category to influence subgenres from the detective novel to the postcolonial texts of magical realism. The decided generic shift toward representations of artistic failure is a response to non-literary cultural developments of the period. Taking the artist novel as a distinctive, historical code, the dissertation examines the systematic revision of generic conventions by writers such as Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Martin Amis, Jeanette Winterson, Salman Rushdie, and Ian McEwan, and interrogates the socio-historical factors that precipitate such transformations.;The tale of the frustrated, would-be artist has its roots firmly in modernism. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Joyce and Woolf were already questioning the extent to which the artist figure can be integrated into society. From the 1950s and 1960s onward, the artist novel increasingly demonstrates what I term the bifurcation of the novelist. Authors seek to cultivate the remove of a tortured artist writing for a philistine public, while a contradictory impulse compels them to court commercial success, to anticipate the large advances secured by their literary agents, and to expect the fame conferred by literary prizes, bestsellers' lists, book clubs, and new media outlets: guarantors of a writer's success that are particular to the postwar era. The result of these conflicting tensions, pulling the novelist in different directions, has been a division of the artist-protagonist, a somatic split, in which the novelist separates his or her authorial surrogate into a pair of doubles: one, a dedicated artist, firmly in the Proustian mold, the other an artist manque or hack, whose pursuit of celebrity undermines his or her artistic integrity.