Hegel’s designation of America as ‘the land of the future’ has been echoed by the conspicuous ‘Americanocentrism’ of Postmodernism – in Fredric Jameson’s words, the ‘the first specifically North American global style’. This marks a reversal of imperial fortunes. Where once the literary forms of the British Empire (the novel paramount among them) had been disseminated across the Anglophone world as so many instruction manuals for bourgeois subjectivity, now the ‘frivolous’ forms of US culture are eroding the last of those underpinnings of the Victorian era, and helping to establish a decentred, consumerist subjectivity. This feature of Postmodernism is one reason why there have been so few British defenders of that aesthetic, and why titles such as The Illusions of Postmodernism, What’s Wrong with Postmodernism and Against Postmodernism characterise British contributions to the debate. Yet a sober assessment of the facts is not necessarily apologia; and we will conclude this chapter with a quick discussion of the irresistible economics of that same ‘cultural imperialism’ as it literally swallowed up British publishing in the late twentieth century.

There is at any rate the sense that Postmodernism came to the United Kingdom as a pre-packaged phenomenon. Whereas the likes of Pynchon, Barthelme, Coover and Gass had launched a literary campaign against an imposing international style, the British Postmodernists had not only the American example, but also the rising tide of continental theory before them. The two ‘posts’ (-Modernism and -Structuralism) were, by the late 1970s, achieved realities, and, since both took the act of writing particularly seriously, served as convenient bulwarks whence to assail the literary establishment.