2The foreword to the third issue of The Gadfly (October 31st, 1953), ironically published in the middle of the issue, states the goal of the magazine as follows:

The Gadfly banned in 1888 after one issue for lovely scurrility and the Grantas that succeeded it had roughly that aim. One of the immaturities of undergraduate society now is the way it swims in separate channels: the Footlights are funny and the little magazines corrugate their brows, the scientist’s spectroscope and the art student’s apple lie on different shelves. We should like then to effect a small union.

3When they assert that the English novel is dead and that there is a definite need for the publication of new international writers, the editors thus act in accordance with the tone set by their forebears. However, the rejuvenation of the magazine in 1979 was the true rupture both in shape and content: the first issue of the new series, ‘New American Writing’, was meant as a protest against the state of contemporary British fiction. The first sentence of the editorial, itself closer in its form to an aesthetic manifesto than a mere introduction to the issue, is ‘It is increasingly a discomforting commonplace that today’s British novel is neither remarkable nor remarkably interesting’ (Granta 1, 3). As a literary quarterly produced within the city walls of Cambridge by two postgraduate students, the issue garnered considerable attention and had to be reprinted soon after the first run of 800 copies.

4This rebellion against the state of the national literary production is by no means an isolated phenomenon. However, considering Granta’s cultural impact, it seems necessary to observe the position it adopted over the years, from the blunt declarations of the first issue to the equally blunt analyses of the third issue and, more recently, to the outrage of ‘What Happened to Us?’ issue 56 (Winter 1996), and to the representation in 2012 of Britain and its literature as a cracked teacup on the cover of the ‘Britain’ issue (Spring 2012, 119). The attitude displayed by the magazine over the years has thus often been characterised by outrage. Outrage, in its OED definition, is essentially dependent on violence, but the dictionary also stresses the origin of the word, which stems from transgression and the existence of a threshold which, when crossed, causes the outrage. The outrage displayed by Granta goes beyond mere dissatisfaction or subversion, being an anger aiming at crossing boundaries. Outrage then seems, in this particular case, to become the core of a paradox as it is used, from the beginnings of the magazine, as a marketing and editorial tool. Anger becomes a selling point. I therefore propose to consider the way in which Granta has used outrage to challenge the boundaries of the English novel as an aesthetic and national model, the better to map out the landscape of contemporary British writing.

7These later issues focus both on national identity, presented as a broken teacup on the Sir Paul Smith-designed cover of the ‘Britain’ issue (119, Spring 2012), or on internal fractures: the back cover of issue 56 (Winter 1996), entitled ‘What happened to us? Britain’s Valedictory Realism’, asks ‘Is this a nation, a way of life, saying farewell to itself?’ The issue itself opens on a controversial text written in the first person, ‘The Enemy Within’, by John Banville, focusing on a British spy during the Cold War. Such an enduring cultural discourse has also prevailed in other periodicals, such as the Times Literary Supplement, publishing in 1997 an issue entitled ‘The End of Britain?’ (quoted in Legge 11) in which art and politics are closely linked (the cover advertises an article by George Walden, a former Tory minister, entitled ‘Damien Hirst and Democracy’, in which the author violently derides the Young British Artists as a derivative, parochial movement).

8Granta distinguishes itself from the ambient discourse of the cultural decline of the country through the use of outrage to manifest its rejection of a model perceived as outdated since it uses a template inherited from the Victorian era. According to the editorial of the first issue, the British novel should not be based on its forebears: ‘there are few new voices in British writing today, mostly just echoes: the nineteenth century persists nowhere as it does in the contemporary English novel’ (Granta 1, 3). The superimposition which occurs between the national space and the novel is, according to the editors, related to ‘sameness, a predictable, even if articulate prattling of predictable predicaments’ (Granta 1, 3). This first editorial thus outlines the reproaches made to the English novel, but also delineates why the editors’ outrage extends to the necessity of an opening to the American novel which is described as the opposite of the English novel. The rest of the editorial develops an argumentation closer to that of an academic paper as it dwells on the state of contemporary American fiction. Unlike the English novel, it is praised for its diversity, its experimentations on the model of Donald Barthelme or Thomas Pynchon but also for its attention to the non-fiction novel (and therefore in experimentations with the narration in the form of a novel of actual events) and narration. It is thus opposed to its British counterpart which ‘[rushes] into the senseless and then [refuses] to go further, [locating] the incoherent and the mutable and the predominance of its impersonal media only to refuse to rise above it’ (Granta 1, 9). Furthering this perspective, the end of the editorial defines what the new Granta is, ‘a kind of energetic failure’ (Granta 1, 10) meant to encourage discussion.

9This call for energy against exhaustion, be it synonymous with chaos, becomes a staple of the artistic discourse of the time. As the critic Elizabeth Legge reminds her reader in her article devoted to the Young British Artists, ‘Reinventing Derivation: Roles, Stereotypes, and “Young British Art”’, readers of the American art magazine Artforum witness the ‘crude energy’ of the Young British Artists (Corris, quoted by Legge 8), the art movement emerging in the late 1980s. The editorial thus moves from an initial outrage at the perpetuation of a Victorian literary model in England which has become stilted and sterile, to outrage at the refusal to move beyond the original experimentation of early postmodernism. The editorial, from an outraged piece, becomes an appeal to outrage, to rebellion, and thus an artistic manifesto, hence the definition of the editors who acknowledge the diversity of the magazine in this first issue.

10The editors criticise the lack of intercultural dialogue they perceive in the English novel which follows this earlier model—even mimicking this isolation in their text: ‘Insulated. Enclosed. Consider the resistance to other influences, foreign influences’ (Granta 1, 3). Outrage is then used as an encouragement to dialogue, to go beyond a mere rebellion against isolation: the structure of the issues themselves is based on a dialogic intent, initially between academic discourse and narrative texts, and in later issues, between different genres and between fiction and non-fiction. The first issue opens with an interview of Theodore Solotaroff, and features both narrative material from authors (for instance a preliminary piece from William Gass’s The Tunnel, ‘The First Winter of My Married Life’, as well as an academic piece by a Cambridge graduate student, Don Guttenplan, ‘The Wor(l)ds of William Gass’). In the third issue, whose title, ‘The End of The English Novel’, is programmatic, the primary and the secondary sources are separated in two sections, the first one being comprised of narrative texts by international writers like Salman Rushdie (the issue features the first published extract of Midnight's Children, published without the author’s consent), Alan Sillitoe or Angela Carter, and the second one, ‘A Symposium on the British novel’, containing essays on the definitive end of the Victorian model of fiction, the English novel, and on the necessity of the rebuilding of the British novel. This issue furthers the arguments of the first editorial, asserting both the need for dialogue (as the chosen term ‘symposium’ suggests) and the lack of commitment in British fiction: the outrage of the first issue leads to a rebellion specifically targeted at the English novel, a position announced with humour by the cover. The cover illustration is a photograph of a weeping figure resting its head on a tombstone on which is engraved ‘In Loving Memory of—’, but the black frame of the cover hides the name; it is therefore possible to read the inscription as ‘In Loving Memory of—The End of The English Novel’. The issue thus proposes both an analysis of the reasons behind what is perceived as the demise of the English novel as described in the first issue and several texts used as examples of the new model of British fiction.

the old divisions and the old generalizations are no longer usable. The fiction of today is, as Lorna Sage points out in her symposium essay, testimony to an invasion of outsiders, using a language much larger than the culture. . . . Today, however, the imagination resides along the peripheries. . . . It is, at last, the end of the English novel and the beginning of the British one. (Granta 3, 16)

12In this conclusion, Bill Buford calls for a rupture from a paradigm inherited from the nineteenth century and from an insular model: outrage becomes directed essentially at the need for a discourse emanating from the margins of cultural authority. The editors’ insistence on the role of the peripheries, the margins, corresponds to the desire to externalise their refusal to perpetuate a literary model they saw as limited by its own generic and national boundaries.

13The editors thus expressed their outrage at the state of the novel in Britain, but did not limit their rebellion to the aesthetics of the novel, expanding it to the literary field as a whole. Granta therefore aimed at echoing a rebellion which expanded from the realm of fiction: the third issue already displayed a shift in the target of outrage and the magazine explicitly meant to create a debate. Bill Buford later expressed this absence of dialogue and lack of external stimulation as one of the main motivations behind his change in the magazine; he recalls, during an interview, a conversation with Martin Amis during which the novelist expressed similar views to the editor’s:

Buford recalls a later conversation with [Martin] Amis in which the novelist said: ‘If you were a literary fiction writer and you were a kid, your horizon was empty, there was really nothing else going on. People weren't writing fiction or talking about it—everyone wanted to work for the BBC.’ (Garfield)

14Not only is the novel accused of being isolated from its readers, it is also described as separated from the broader cultural context: the field of literary production is described as essentially monological and therefore failing. The editorial of the third issue, or ‘introduction’, rebels more against the publishing industry than it attacks the writers themselves: the terms ‘Great Crisis in Publishing’ appear in bold letters throughout the entire text. They broaden the debate, leading it the topic of the state of culture and the relationship between the demands of the market and the novels produced by the British publishing industry. Bill Buford then describes the English novel as having several flaws which he proposes to remedy through the publication of Granta: he sees the contemporary literary production as a phenomenon caught in a paradoxical situation, a type of fiction characterised by a lack of a clear aesthetic direction (‘unlike most other historical periods, the problem is not simply one of number but of kind: today’s interesting fiction had until recently exhibited little sense of unity’ [Granta 3, 8]) and, a recurring argument in the early Granta issues, a lack of dialogue (he describes the English novel as ‘that postwar, premodern variety of the middle class monologue, with C. P. Snow on one side and perhaps Margaret Drabble and Melvyn Bragg on the other’ [Granta 3, 9]). The paradox the editor points at lies in the publishing houses: they are accused of transforming the access to books into a luxury when the novels are distinctly, according to Bill Buford, marketed as highbrow products, as he asserts bluntly in the same editorial: ‘Faced with many English novels, I confess I’d rather watch television. Faced recently by their price, I see I have no choice.’
(Granta 3, 8)

15The editor’s attack grows more brutal in his depiction of the exaggerated figure of the ‘Great British Public’:

Of course, it is commonplace that what is published in the end is decided by the Great British Public. A mythic beast of extraordinary proportions—with puffy white arms, sustained by McVities chocolate biscuits and books about the Queen Mother—this Great Public has been elevated to virtually incontestable authority. (Granta 3, 11)

16This portrait, based on a list of national clichés, enables him to combine images taken from popular culture and an indirect attack on the figure of the ‘common reader’, a well-publicised figure since Virginia Woolf’s 1925 essay ‘The Common Reader’, in which she insists on the notion of pleasure but also on the existence of a precarious, in-between cultural positioning. What emerges in these editorials is, indirectly, a challenge to the boundaries of cultural authority. The figure of the ‘Great British Public’, a recurring expression in the issue, is used as a negative form of the instability of the ‘middlebrow’, a cultural authority with no justification, and therefore ridiculed by the editors. The true outrage at work here, beyond the criticism of the English novel, seems to be a challenge to the borders of national cultural authority. The irony of the term ‘Great British Public’, underlined in the opening page of the third issue, becomes a scathing attack against the rules defining both literary taste and its relationship to the marketing of literature.

20This display of strategies aims at creating a specific aura for the magazine to separate it from its original reputation as a student publication, thus displacing its influence from the boundaries of Cambridge and the academic world into a broader, international cultural space. The editors’ attacks against the British literary production and the publishing industry can then be considered both as an attempt to be located outside of the specific field of the British literary production, and, with its construction of a specific aura of cultural authority, as a new landmark, a new ‘Greenwich Meridian of Literature’ (Casanova xi). As Pascale Casanova postulates in her introduction to The World Republic of Letters, the space of literature, partly independent from national borders, determines its own frontiers. Every part of the literary space, like national entities, still follows the same time standard according to a particular reference, the Greenwich Meridian. Granta, from the periphery of the literary map, aims at becoming a reference, a landmark, while maintaining a posture of rebellion and of refusal.

22Such intent is part of the general aesthetics of the magazine and its advertising portion reflects it. The call for subscriptions, when it reminds the reader that the magazine cannot be restricted to a single editorial line, corresponds to the texts published in the third issue (and, with a few evolutions, in the subsequent issues). The issue indeed features both authors who were already published and had reached a certain notoriety and as-yet unpublished authors: Angela Carter’s short story ‘Cousins’ recalls, both in style and content, her then-recently published short story collection The Bloody Chamber and follows ‘Midnight’s Children’, by Salman Rushdie, a fragment from his novel in the form of a long short story, before its publication.

23Granta thus showcases a keen interest in limits, how they might be crossed and how they can be shifted: in its refusal to be limited to a single position, the magazine publishes texts from various genres, from the magical realism prevailing in Salman Rushdie’s text to the more experimental interior monologue ‘Riddley Walker’ by Russell Hoban which concludes the first part of the third issue. It also reworks the nuances of the opposition between texts produced in different countries: if the first issue lays emphasis on the dynamism of the contemporary American novel, by the third issue, the texts are published with no mention of the author’s country of origin save for the ‘Notes on Contributors’ which concludes each issue. The third issue also insists on the distinction between the ‘English novel’ and the 'British novel’: beyond the refusal to conform to a literary model, this addresses a desire to change a label which seems to exclusively link the English language to Victorian fiction. Thus, in the third issue, the two adjectives are used as antagonistic figures. Lorna Sage, in her ‘Invasion from Outsiders’ essay, then insists on the essential role of what she calls ‘invasion’ in contemporary fiction (Granta 3, 134) and she writes: ‘much of what’s significant in English fiction is written with “elsewhere” very much in mind’. This ‘end of empire’ analysis of the literary production was by 1980 well publicised in the academic world, and is shown here as related to the renewal of British fiction—the presence of the ‘other’ is here presented as a key element in the inclusion of the novel within a broader dialogical structure.

25Outrage, in Granta, has moved from an original aesthetic positioning against the limitations of the British novel to a new set of limits, and has enabled the magazine to move from the periphery of the literary world to its centre by becoming a cultural icon. The object created by the impetus of its outraged—and outrageous—beginnings has used shock value as a way of asserting an editorial line aiming to promote a dialogue in contemporary culture as well as a constant readjustment of its ever-shifting borders, creating communication between various media to challenge the readers’ horizon of expectation. The graphic ‘Sex issue’ cover (Spring 2010, 112) and the ‘Aliens’ cover (Winter 2011, 114), whose visual frame of reference leads the reader to expect a science-fiction issue when it is revealed that it is a montage based on a photograph of migrants, cultivate such a tradition by maintaining unease and instability. The ‘Horror’ (Autumn 2011, 117) and the ‘Medicine’ (Summer 2012, 120) issues, exploring the limits of the human body, have also shown the magazine’s willingness to test boundaries on a number of levels, ensuring that Granta remains a cultural icon caught between the ‘Great British Public’ and a desire to locate and test borders.