Depending on what you mean by "our age," my money's on Harper Lee, Margaret Atwood, or George Orwell. I think the late 20th and early 21st century will be primarily used by future scholars to represent dystopia, or at the very least, civil strife; they'll look for authors who are already elevated into the canon, but whose work remains "edgy." They'll especially be interested in language that seems characteristic of our time, and all of these three have very striking prose. (Go open To Kill A Mockingbird. I'll wait.)
If I have to pick just one of those three, I'd bet on Atwood, because (a) she has a much larger body of work than the other two, and (b) her work is frequently concerned with futurity and multitemporality, which is a feature your other examples share.
But all of that is cynicism, because the author I hope will make it is good old JK. She is, like Austen and like Shakespeare, a writer who wrote for love and to delight others; like them, she wasn't trying to make High Art (even if time and distance has elevated the others into that stratum). She raised a generation. I'd like to believe that counts for something.
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yati
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Date: 2014-10-23 09:09 pm (UTC)If I have to pick just one of those three, I'd bet on Atwood, because (a) she has a much larger body of work than the other two, and (b) her work is frequently concerned with futurity and multitemporality, which is a feature your other examples share.
But all of that is cynicism, because the author I hope will make it is good old JK. She is, like Austen and like Shakespeare, a writer who wrote for love and to delight others; like them, she wasn't trying to make High Art (even if time and distance has elevated the others into that stratum). She raised a generation. I'd like to believe that counts for something.