Literature at the End of History

Examining a range of novelists and critics during the decades of decolonization, the cold war and globalization-from Naipaul to Susan Sontag, Fanon to Edward Said-Pankaj Mishra uncovers two divergent trends: while writers in the global south could not but describe individual fates in their relation to coercive power, political intelligence and literary sensibility became gradually disjunct in Anglo-American fiction and criticism.

Modern literature has recorded, from the nineteenth century onwards, the determining influence of ideas and ideology on private experience. But social and political conflict became conspicuous by its absence in much contemporary fiction and literary criticism in the United States and Britain. Literature at the End of History makes clear how impoverished the West's literary culture is as a result-with vanishingly few exceptions-and where the great literature of the world really comes from.