Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present

ISBN-13: 9781138172692 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 226 str.

Roger Luckhurst; Peter Marks

Opis

At the end of the century, much criticism has become devoted to last things': the end of history, the end of the subject, the end of the novel, the end, even, of the end. Literature and the Contemporary, in contrast, aims to provide through twelve essays evidence of the way in which the literature of the 1990s is constantly engaging in questions of memory and history and the representation of time in the present day.
The essays in the book survey theories of temporality from various cultural and philosophical standpoints, and represent critics writing from feminist, postcolonial and queer' perspectives discussing literature in our time'. The collection addresses such central issues as the politics of memory, colonial legacies, women's time, racial and sexual identities in the 1990s, and covers a wide range of contemporary authors, works and issues, some of which are treated for the first time. Among the contemporary works discussed are the prize-winning books Graham Swift's Last Orders, Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces, and Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres.
While discussing some of the most significant novels of the 1990s, this collection also offers a diverse yet cohesive critique of the millennial leanings of much postmodernist' criticism, which it argues should be replaced by more variously nuanced engagements with literature and the contemporary.

Spis treści

Acknowledgements  Notes on Contributors  1. Hurry Up Please It's Time: Introducing the Contemporary  PART ONE: TIME TODAY  2. The Impossibility of the Present; Or, form the Contemporary to the Contemporal  3. The Politics of Time  Modernity, Postmodernity  4. Now, Here, This  5. Melancholic Modernity and Contemporary Greif: The Novels of Graham Swift  Memory  6. Memory Recovered/Recovered Memory  7. `We come after': Remembering the Holocaust  PART TWO: INTERSECTION  The Post-colonial contemporary  8. The Rhizome of Post-Colonial Discourse  9. The Dialect of Myth and History in the Post-Colonial Contemporary: Soyinka's `A Dance of the Forests'  Feminism  10. The Gender Differential, Again and Not Yet  11. Back to the Future: Revisiting Kristeva's `Women's Time'  Queering Now  12. Crossing the Present, Narrative, Alterity and Gender in Postmodern Fiction  13. A Queer Spirit of the Times  Index

O autorze

Roger Luckhurst teaches in the Department of English, at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Peter Marks teaches in the Department of English at the University of Sydney, Australia.