As the 21st century got underway, history remained the outstanding concern of English literature. Although contemporary issues such as global warming and international conflicts (especially the Second Persian Gulf War and its aftermath) received attention, writers were still more disposed to look back.
Bennett’s play The History Boys (filmed 2006) premiered in 2004; it portrayed pupils in a school in the north of England during the 1980s. Although Cloud Atlas (2004)—a far-reaching book by David Mitchell, one of the more ambitious novelists to emerge during this period—contained chapters that envisage future eras ravaged by malign technology and climactic and nuclear devastation, it devoted more space to scenes set in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
