Abstract
Making sense of the past is a common concern among post-war novelists, especially English ones. In The Situation of the Novel, published in 1970, Bernard Bergonzi argued that, as a result of the uncertainties brought about by recent history, contemporary fiction was poised somewhere ‘between nostalgia and nightmare’, alternatively or simultaneously imagining a brutal apocalyptic future and ‘a vanished era’, most often that of the ‘Edwardian summer’.1