主播大秀

The fourth episode of this six-part series on the English novel looks at social divide in novels in England and further afield. Using performed readings and with contributions from contemporary novelists and critics the series explores the power that novels had in the past and still have today. In the USA, class was thought by some not to exist, but F Scott Fitzgerald's high society The Great Gatsby showed powerfully that it did. And after the second World War, a new generation of working-class writers emerged from with honest portraits of their own communities. Workers began to read novels by and about themselves. This episode examines two books from recent decades that a novelist like Charles Dickens would have recognised - Irvine Welsh's incendiary Trainspotting and Avarind Adiga's 2008 Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger. Dickens had written about the fallout from the industrial revolution in the United Kingdom and The White Tiger shows the fall out from the tech revolution in India. The story of social divide in the English novel has never gone away.