Twenty-First Century Fiction: What Happens Now

ISBN-13: 9781137035172 / Angielski / Twarda / 2013 / 252 str.

Sian Adiseshiah; Rupert Hildyard

Opis

Does twenty-first century fiction offer the reader identifiably new fictional styles, themes, characteristics or tropes? What theoretical ideas best describe the uncertain world we appear now to be living in? What are the most interesting and significant novels of the twenty-first century and what do they tell us about the contemporary times we live in? These are the key questions engaged with in this new critical volume of essays on 21st century fiction. The chapters explore the work of writers as diverse as Salman Rushdie, David Peace, Ali Smith, Margaret Atwood, Iain Banks, China Mieville, Trezza Azzopardi, John Burnside and Hilary Mantel in depth and at length, developing fresh critical approaches to work that is genuinely of our time. Throughout this unique collection the aim is to identify what is distinctive and innovative about the individual novels and about 21st century fiction in general.

Spis treści

1. Introduction: What Happens Now; Siân Adiseshiah and Rupert Hildyard 2. Such a Thing as Avant Garde Has Ceased to Exist: The Hidden Legacies of the British Experimental Novel; Jenny Hodgson 3. Tough Shit Erich Auerbach: Contingency and Estrangement in David Peace's Occupied City and Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher ; Phil Redpath  4. When the Two Sevens Clash: David Peace's Nineteen Seventy-Seven as 'Occult History'; Dean Lockwood 5. Remaindered Books: Glen Duncan's Twenty-First-Century Novels; Alice Bennett 6. 'The journey creates us. We become the frontiers we cross': Stepping Across Lines in Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown ; Daniel O'Gorman 7. 'The Private Rooms and Public Haunts': Theatricality and the City of London in Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White ; Lin Pettersson  8. 'This is my Opa. Do you remember him killing the Jews?': Rachel Seiffert's ' Micha ' and the Transgenerational Haunting of a Silenced Past; María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro 9. A Voice without a Name: Gothic Homelessness in Ali Smith's Hotel World and Trezza Azzopardi's Remember Me ; Emily Horton 10. Ghosts of Postmodernity – Spectral Epistemology and Haunting in Hilary Mantel's Fludd and Beyond Black ; Wolfgang Funk 11. Intimations of Immortality: Semiologies of Ageing and the Lineaments of Eternity in Contemporary Prose; Lucy Perry 12. Crosshatching: Boundary Crossing in the Post-millennial British Boom; Jude Roberts 13. 'You just know when the world is about to break apart': Utopia, Dystopia, and New Global Uncertainties in Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army ; Iain Robinson 14. Finding the Right Kind of Attention: Dystopia and Transcendence in John Burnside's Glister; Florian Niedlich Introduction: Glister, Romantic Thought and the Religious Turn Dystopia and Transcendence Conclusion: A Form of Reading

O autorze

Alice Bennett, Liverpool Hope University, UK. Wolfgang Funk, Leibniz University Hanover, Germany Jennifer Hodgson, postgraduate researcher, Durham University, UK Emily Horton, Brunel University, UK. Dean Lockwood, University of Lincoln, UK María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro, University of Zaragoza, Spain Florian Niedlich, University of Würzburg, Germany Daniel O'Gorman, postgraduate researcher, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK Lucy Perry, An-Najah National University, Palestine Lin Pettersson, University of Málaga, Spain Phil Redpath, University of Lincoln, UK Jude Roberts, postgraduate researcher, University of Nottingham, UK Iain Robinson, University of East Anglia, UK