How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 1970s shape Contemporary British Fiction?

Exploring the impact of events like the Cold War, miners' strikes and Winter of Discontent, this volume charts the transition of British fiction from post-war to contemporary.

Chapters outline the decade's diversity of writing, showing how the literature of Ian McEwan and Iain Sinclair interacted with the experimental work of B.S. Johnson. Close contextual readings of Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish and English novels map the steady break-up of Britain. Tying the...

How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 1980s shape contemporary British fiction?

Setting the fiction squarely within the context of Conservative politics and questions about culture and national identity, this volume reveals how the decade associated with Thatcherism frames the work of Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis, and Graham Swift, of Scottish novelists and new diasporic writers. How and why 1980s fiction is a response to particular psychological, social and economic pressures is explored in detail. Drawing on the rise of individualism and the birth of...

How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 1990s shape contemporary British Fiction?

From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the turn of the millennium, the 1990s witnessed a realignment of global politics. Against the changing international scene, this volume uses events abroad and in Britain to examine and explain the changes taking place in British fiction, including: the celebration of national identities, fuelled by the move toward political devolution in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales; the literary optimism in urban ethnic fictions written by a new...

How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 2000s shape contemporary British fiction?

The means of publishing, buying and reading fiction changed dramatically between 2000 and 2010. This volume explores how the socio-political and economic turns of the decade, bookended by the beginning of a millennium and an economic crisis, transformed the act of writing and reading. Through consideration of, among other things, the treatment of neuroscience, violence, the historical and youth subcultures in recent fiction, the essays in this collection explore the complex...