/lit/ - Literature

I concede that James Joyce is the best author of the past 200 years, perhaps a contender for best prose author ever, in any language.

Other than James Joyce and Samuel Beckett (Molloy, Malone, the Unnameable) however, most of the significant prose in the English language of the past 200 hundred years has came from the United States. Fitzgerald, Pynchon, Melville, Hawthorne. The best "British" authors of this modern period have been Dickens, who for all his talent is by no means on one hundred percent solid critical footing, and Joseph Conrad (Polack).

Anything before this period, Britain of course steals the show. Tristram Shandy and the Anatomy of Melancholy both being meme trilogy worthy novels and John Milton's style being the model for clearness and diction. But their culture and tastes just became incredibly insipid and shallow after 1800 somehow at least in prose.

Verse-wise, the Brits have the rest of the English speaking world beaten then and now-ish; poetry being kind of a fallen art form now.