Contemporary British Novel Since 2000


Book Description

Focuses on the novels published since 2000 by twenty major British novelistsThe Contemporary British Novel Since 2000 is divided into five parts, with the first part examining the work of four particularly well-known and highly regarded twenty-first century writers: Ian McEwan, David Mitchell, Hilary Mantel and Zadie Smith. It is with reference to each of these novelists in turn that the terms arealist, apostmodernist, ahistorical and apostcolonialist fiction are introduced, while in the remaining four parts, other novelists are discussed and the meaning of the terms amplified. From the start it is emphasised that these terms and others often mean different things to different novelists, and that the complexity of their novels often obliges us to discuss their work with reference to more than one of the terms.Also discusses the works of: Maggie OFarrell, Sarah Hall, A.L. Kennedy, Alan Warner, Ali Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kate Atkinson, Salman Rushdie, Adam Foulds, Sarah Waters, James Robertson, Mohsin Hamid, Andrea Levy, and Aminatta Forna.




The Contemporary British Novel


Book Description

Second edition of this guide for students studying contemporary British writing - written by one of the key academics in the field of modern fiction studies.




The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature


Book Description

THE WILEY BLACKWELL COMPANION TO CONTEMPORARY BRITISH AND IRISH LITERATURE An insightful guide to the exploration of modern British and Irish literature The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature is a must-have guide for anyone hoping to navigate the world of new British and Irish writing. Including modern authors and poets from the 1960s through to the 21st century, the Companion provides a thorough overview of contemporary poetry, fiction, and drama by some of the most prominent and noteworthy writers. Seventy-three comprehensive chapters focus on individual authors as well as such topics as Englishness and identity, contemporary Science Fiction, Black writing in Britain, crime fiction, and the influence of globalization on British and Irish Literature. Written in four parts, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature includes comprehensive examinations of individual authors, as well as a variety of themes that have come to define the contemporary period: ethnicity, gender, nationality, and more. A thorough guide to the main figures and concepts in contemporary literature from Britain and Ireland, this two-volume set: Includes studies of notable figures such as Seamus Heaney and Angela Carter, as well as more recently influential writers such as Zadie Smith and Sarah Waters. Covers topics such as LGBT fiction, androgyny in contemporary British Literature, and post-Troubles Northern Irish Fiction Features a broad range of writers and topics covered by distinguished academics Includes an analysis of the interplay between individual authors and the major themes of the day, and whether an examination of the latter enables us to appreciate the former. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature provides essential reading for students as well as academics seeking to learn more about the history and future direction of contemporary British and Irish Literature.




A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction


Book Description

A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction offers an authoritative overview of contemporary British fiction in its social, political, and economic contexts. Focuses on the fiction that has emerged since the late 1970s, roughly since the start of the Thatcher era. Comprises original essays from major scholars. Topics range from the rise and fall of the postcolonial novel to controversies over the celebrity author. The emphasis is on the whole fiction scene, from bookstores and prizes to the changing economics of film adaptation. Enables students to read contemporary works of British fiction with a much clearer sense of where they fit within British cultural life.




Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel


Book Description

This book examines the experience of time functions in a specific set of British novels to reveal the persistence of the utopian imagination in the twenty-first century. Through close textual analysis, Edwards develops a new strategy of reading such anticipatory 'fictions of the not yet', including novels by Hari Kunzru, Maggie Gee, David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Jim Crace, Joanna Kavenna, Grace McCleen, Jon McGregor, and Claire Fuller. Read in the context of the philosophical category of non-contemporaneity, these novels reveal a significant new direction in twenty-first-century fiction. Their formal inventiveness and suggestively non-mimetic encounters with otherwise realist narrative representations of contemporary experience open up a realm of utopian possibility that shines through in moments of temporal alterity: glimpses of the future, redeemed strands of past hopes, and alternative social worlds already alive in the present.




The Contemporary British Historical Novel


Book Description

A detailed study of an increasingly popular genre, this book offers readings of a group of significant and representative works, drawing on a range of interpretative strategies to examine the ways in which the contemporary historical novel engages with questions of nation and identity to illuminate Britain's post-imperial condition.




Unmaking Love


Book Description

The contemporary novel does more than revise our conception of love—it explodes it, queers it, and makes it unrecognizable. Rather than providing union, connection, and completion, love in contemporary fiction destroys the possibility of unity, harbors negativity, and foregrounds difference. Comparing contemporary and modernist depictions of love to delineate critical continuities and innovations, Unmaking Love locates queerness in the novelistic strategies of Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Hanif Kureshi, Alan Hollinghurst, and Hari Kunzru. In their work, "queer love" becomes more than shorthand for sexual identity. It comes to embody thwarted expectations, disarticulated organization, and unnerving multiplicity. In queer love, social forms are deformed, affective bonds do not bind, and social structures threaten to come undone. Unmaking Love draws on psychoanalysis and gender and sexuality studies to read love's role in contemporary literature and its relation to queer negativity.




Gender and Short Fiction


Book Description

In their new monograph, Gender and Short Fiction: Women's Tales in Contemporary Britain, Jorge Sacido-Romero and Laura M Lojo-Rodriguez explain why artistically ambitious women writers continue turning to the short story, a genre that has not yet attained the degree of literary prestige and social recognition the novel has had in the modern period. In this timely volume, the editors endorse the view that the genre still retains its potential as a vehicle for the expression of female experience alternative to and/or critical with dominant patriarchal ideology present at the very onset of the development of the modern British short story at the turn of the nineteenth century.




The Modern British Novel


Book Description

Bradbury argues that almost a century since the emergence of Modernism, it is now possible to see the entire period in perspective. It is clear that the first 50 years - from Henry James, Wilde and Stevenson, through James Joyce, Lawrence, Forster, to Huxley, Isherwood and Orwell - have been extensively discussed in print. The years since World War II, though, have not been examined in depth, yet have produced talents such as Graham Greene, Angus Wilson, Beckett, Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Angela Carter, Ian McEwan, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Fay Weldon, Salman Rushdie and Timothy Mo.




Masculinity and Patriarchal Villainy in the British Novel


Book Description

Masculinity and Patriarchal Villainy in the British Novel: From Hitler to Voldemort sits at the intersection of literary studies and masculinity studies, arguing that the villain, in many works of contemporary British fiction, is a patriarchal figure that embodies an excess of patriarchal power that needs to be controlled by the hero. The villains' stories are enactments of empowerment fantasies and cautionary tales against abusing patriarchal power. While providing readers with in-depth studies of some of the most popular contemporary fiction villans, Sara Martín shows how current representations of the villain are not only measured against previous literary characters but also against the real-life figure of the archvillain Adolf Hitler.