Airdate: In Their Own Words: British Novelists

Next month Foxtel Arts presents a doco series In Their Own Words: British Novelists, looking at the literary works of D.H. Lawrence, W.H. Auden and Angela Carter.

Episode 1- Amongst The Ruins (1919-1939) Monday July 6 at 6.30pm
Series looking at the story of the British novel in the 20th century, told by those who know it best – the authors themselves. ‘We are among the ruins’, wrote DH Lawrence describing the decade after the First World War. The interwar years generated self-doubt and ideological crisis as Britain contemplated the devastation of war and the demise of empire which would transform the British novel. Some of the greatest, most innovative works of modern British fiction were written during this period and they have retained their power over the fate and fortune of the novel ever since.

Episode 2- The Age of Anxiety (1945-1969) Monday July 13 at 6.30pm
This second part marks the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the atomic age, with humanity now having the power of world destruction. What WH Auden coined the Age of Anxiety had begun. The holocaust and the nuclear cloud dominated the sensibility of the period and as political tensions worsened, the mood of anxiety, horror and fear of possible Armageddon intensified. A new generation of novelists were on hand to confront and articulate this age; the period that reaffirmed realism was also the period of its dissolution.

Episode 3- Nothing Sacred (1970-1990) Monday July 20 at 6.30pm
The third and final part explores the 1970s and 80s – a period in which, as Angela Carter put it, there was ‘nothing sacred’ as the mores of the time were incessantly called into question. Novelists were at the forefront of a new revolution as British fiction was suddenly thrust into the limelight. Acting as agents of provocation, these disparate British writers indelibly changed the literary climate.