Alan Sinfield (1941–2017)

As an analysis of literature and culture in post-war Britain, this is indeed fabulous. Sinfield occasionally makes idiotic, hyperbolic comments, but in general his writing is clear and the ways he connects literary works to social change is tremendously convincing. The book's structure is great: not historical in the sense that each chapter recounts a specific period, but also not thematic in the sense that it jumps around from year to year; somehow he manages to have an historical flow combined with thematically tight chapters. The obvious thing to say is that his solution is a bizarre and, from a 2010's perspective, frightening one: that we should all bunker down in our individual subcultures and weather the storm of free market capitalism. Maybe that looked possible in the 80's; at a stretch maybe at moments in the nineties; it's pretty clear now that an appeal to subcultures is about as realistic as appeals to culture in the face of social and political events always is. Given that Sinfield's argument is sympathetic, but ultimately opposed, to New Left style cultural works, the book ends up in a mighty uncomfortable position: culture that is made with universal aspirations is complicit with capitalism; culture that is made for a small group of like-minded (and, at the most absurd, like-coloured, gendered and sexualized) people is a haven from it. I'll take the perhaps hopeless universalist position every time. But if there's anyone I'd like to argue with about this, it's Mr Sinfield.… (altro)