Twentieth century fiction reflects on the successive decades of that century like, for example, the periods before and between the wars, the 1950s and the 1960s, e.g.:
"If I had been living in the 'sixties I might then have left home and shared a flat with cronies; I might have taken to drink or drugs (or both) and chased after pop singers, or I might have opened a boutique or become a feminist or floated off to Nepal to find a guru. But I was living in the 'fifties, that last gasp of the era which had begun in those lost years before the war, and in those days nice young girls 'just didn't do that kind of thing', as the characters in Hedda Gabler say."
-Susan Howatch, Scandalous Risks (London, 1996), PART ONE, TWO, VIII, p. 57.
The first three links above show how Poul Anderson used time travel fiction to reflect on those same past decades.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I think we also get a deeper sense of "reflecting" on their times with some mystery fictions. The examples I've thought of being both Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey stories and Poul Anderson's Trygvi Yamamura novels. And so much time has passed that both are now of interest as period pieces, showing us how different from ours those times were.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Like also Holmes and Poirot. Even Bond's Cold War is now history. Tempora mutantur.
Paul.
Sean,
Lord Peter and Yamamura help us to reflect on the periods in which their novels were written and set but I was referring to novels that reflect on earlier decades.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I certainly got that feeling from reading the Holmes stories! And I've felt that way more than once as I read thru Fleming's James Bond tales, including the recently reread DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER. Inflation, for example, has made what seemed large sums of money in 1955 quite MODEST in our times, here and now!
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
Your second comment: I thought of the mysteries of Sayers and Anderson because stories in that genre focused on answering the question of who perpetrated a crime and catching him. That has to include some thought on degrees of guilt and appropriate means of penalizing crime.
Ad astra! Sean
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