Satirical Apocalypse: Endism and the 1990s Fictions of Will Self

Katy Shaw, Philip Tew

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

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Abstract

(Will Self, ‘Ingenious Bubble Wrap’, 26) [T]he 1990s will come to be seen as the Gotterdammerung of periodicity itself. […] [N]ever again will the brute fact of what year it is matter so much in cultural terms. In ‘The Valley of the Corn Dollies’ in the Guardian in 1994, Will Self said of his homeland: ‘It is a culture of profound and productive oppositions. And I believe, personally, the best possible country for someone with a satirical bent to live in. I’d go further: England has the world’s top satirical culture’ (Junk Mail, 204) . Elsewhere in ‘Conversations: Martin Amis’, Self ‘unquestionably’ situates himself as part of that heritage (408) , working in literary satire, aware of his antecedents. Satire itself has a long tradition, traced back variously to Ancient Egypt and to Greece, to the Romans and to Medieval Europe, although arguably the role of satire as a mode...
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe 1990s
Subtitle of host publicationA Decade of Contemporary British fiction
EditorsLeigh Wilson, Nick Hubble, Phillip Tew
Place of PublicationLondon
PublisherBloomsbury
Chapter3
Pages95-122
Number of pages28
ISBN (Electronic)9781474242424, 9781474242417
ISBN (Print)9781441172587, 9781350005419
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 21 May 2015
Externally publishedYes

Publication series

NameDecade Series
PublisherBloomsbury

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