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

Shaw, Katy and Tew, Philip (2015) Satirical Apocalypse: Endism and the 1990s Fictions of Will Self. In: The 1990s: A Decade of Contemporary British fiction. The Decades Series . Bloomsbury, London, pp. 95-122. ISBN 9781441172587

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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...

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