Reading some post-WWII British Literature

After getting a job interview for post-WWII British Literature (!), I went on a splurge of non-SF&F books related to that time period. Although my diss is in Tolkien, who exactly fits that time period,  American literature has always tended to be more visible for me  -- except for the British modernists, all of whom wrote their main works prior to WWII. Somehow, whenever I encounter modern British authors, I've never really think of them as modern British authors. This holds even more true for the speculative fiction writers; does Pratchett's or Rowling's Englishness really make any difference to anyone? So I thought this was a great opportunity to round out my reading. The recent list of books:

  • Hanif Kurieshi, The Black Album
  • Hanif Kurieshi, Intimacy
  • Zadie Smith, White Teeth
  • Kazuo Ishiguru, The Buried Giant
  • Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies
  • Sarah Waters, Fingersmith
  • Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger
  • Ian McEwing, Amsterdam
  • Zoe Heller, Notes on a Scandal

We could add Susan Hill's The Woman in Black (ghost story) and Paul Hoffman's Left Hand of God trilogy (fantasy). On the bookshelf, purchased but not yet read, is Ian McEwing's Amsterdam and Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal. Mostly, I went for contemporary canonical authors, Booker Award-winning or nominated, who could flesh out some areas for me -- first- or second generation immigrant, non-white, LGBTQ+, etc.. I've either read other books by these authors (McEwing, Ishiguru, Mantel) or encountered them for the first time here (Waters, Smith, Hill, Heller). 
Anyway, a nice thing about this list is that, strangely enough,*** my prelim exams for modern Brit Lit stopped at 1989 (Ishiguru's The Remains of the Day). So my reading in mainstream British literature of the last 30 years is almost entirely cuz I'm a conscientious academic who likes keep abreast of the current literary trends.

Other than that, do these novels have anything else in common? Well, not so much, perhaps, besides being worthy of inclusion in an upper-division literature syllabus. Historical fiction has been a hardcore literary genre in Brit lit of late, but Waters's historical fiction isn't postmodern, nor is Smith's White Teeth (if we want to consider that a historical novel, at least in part). 

But this reading experience does reinforce for me, pleasantly so, just how high the quality of recent science fiction and fantasy novels has been. In a few decades' time, I highly suspect that "genre snobbishness" will become a thing of the past.
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***Well, not so strangely, once you considered the academic politics involved for devising reading lists for doctoral exams. Everybody wants their favorite authors or literary modes/themes represented. 

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