Search Results

This study explores the landscape of contemporary British fiction through detailed analysis of five authors that have emerged to critical prominence in the 21st century. The authors addressed - Ali Smith, Andrew O’Hagan, Tom McCarthy, Sarah Hall, and Jon McGregor – have all established themselves through popular and critical success, but have received significantly less attention than some of their peers. This book does not seek to thrust these authors into a putative canon of 21st century literary writing, but rather to explore through close attention to the resonances, continuities, elisions, and frictions across their works the temper of the contemporary moment as it is expressed by a group of writers. Each is devoted a chapter that analyses their creative output to-date within the frame of their stylistic and thematic development, as well as drawing comparisons across their writing and that of their peers. The intention is never to provide the kind of synoptical overview that a period-study might suggest, instead Twenty-First Century Fiction: Contemporary British Voices seeks to juxtapose critical readings within a constellation of contemporary literary concerns to examine what cultural energies and flows are emerging in the new century. In doing so, it identifies three recurrent areas of concern that might be said to infiltrate our times; these are Materiality, Connectivity, and Authenticity. In many forms and through many articulations, these issues emerge as insistent – if inchoate – questions about how current literary practice is responding to the challenge of the post-millennial world.

This book offers a critique of the dominant understanding and deployment of empathy in the mainstream medical humanities. Drawing on feminist theory, it positions empathy not as something that one has or lacks, and needs to accrue, but as something that one does and that is embedded within structural, institutional and cultural relations of power. It aims to provide a critically informed definition of empathy, drawing on phenomenology, in order to counter the vagueness of the term as it has often been used. It questions, too, the assumption that empathy is limited to the clinical relation, looking to a broader and more encompassing definition of the ‘medical’. Combining theoretical argument with literary case studies of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Pat Barker’s Life Class, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, this book contends that contemporary fiction is not a vehicle for accessing another’s illness experience, but itself engages critically with the question of empathy and its limits. The volume marks a key contribution to the rapidly evolving field of the critical medical humanities.

Reading contemporary fiction and philosophy alongside each other, Animal Writingproposes a thinking of and with animals which brings together critical and affective approaches. Aspiring to a critical distancing from the sometimes claustrophobic proximity of empathy – currently the prevailing mode in Animal Studies – this book interrogates the claims made of empathy without exchanging it for the kind of abstract, disembodied reason which has long disavowed the ethical status of nonhuman life. This book is particularly interested in the stories that we tell, and are told, by beings at the edges of animal life, insects, and the possibility that the indifference, even disgust, that these creatures evoke might form the basis for an ethics which is not bounded by empathy. Across five interdisciplinary chapters, it asks: is it possible to read, write and think non-anthropocentrically? How might we develop approaches to nonhuman life which are affectively and critically informed? It contends that reframing the human in relation to the elements of itself which it denounces as inhuman can inform a renewed attentiveness to nonhuman life.

How do genres develop? In what ways do they reflect changing political and cultural trends? What do they tell us about the motivations of publishers and readers? Combining close readings and formal analysis with a sociology of literary institutions and markets, Minor Characters Have Their Day offers a compelling new approach to genre study and contemporary fiction. Focusing on the booming genre of books that transform minor characters from canonical literary texts into the protagonists of new works, Jeremy Rosen makes broader claims about the state of contemporary fiction, the strategies of the publishing industry over recent decades, and the function of literary characters. Rosen traces the recent surge in “minor-character elaboration” to the late 1960s and works such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. These early examples often recover the voices of marginalized individuals and groups. As the genre has exploded between the 1980s and the present, with novels about Ahab’s wife, Huck Finn’s father, and Mr. Dalloway, it has begun to embody the neoliberal commitments of subjective experience, individual expression, and agency. Eventually, large-scale publishers capitalized on the genre as a way to appeal to educated audiences aware of the prestige of the classics and to draw in identity-based niche markets. Rosen’s conclusion ties the understudied evolution of minor-character elaboration to the theory of literary character.

Truth and Consequences interrogates the ways in which over two dozen works of fiction and film find meaning in the game show. Writers and filmmakers use the game show intermedially as a metaphor for what it means to be a person, a lover, a family, and a citizen in the media age. Despite media culture’s promises of global equality and connectivity (and one’s efforts to realize that promise), individuals wind up isolated by market-driven deception, wealth, or ethnicity. People use media to achieve greater intimacy with others, but the market nudges them to keep their distance from each other in the name of exploring options. Other networks can still assert themselves, such as the family, but can only sustain themselves if they openly defy and rewrite the rules of the media culture they inhabit. Although America espouses a commitment to democratic freedom, the state partners with imagemakers to make one’s lack of choice entertaining and resistance self-defeating. Amidst these obstacles, Americans still feel called upon to remember, to connect, to buzz in, to answer in the hopes that an escape awaits in the next round, behind the next door.

This book is the first collection of scholarly essays on alternate history in over a decade and features contributions from a mixture of major figures and rising stars in the field of science fiction studies. Alternate history is a genre of fiction which, although connected to the genres of utopian, dystopian and science fiction, has its own rich history and lineage. With roots in the writings of ancient Rome, alternate history matured into something close to its current form in the essays and novels of the nineteenth century. In more recent years a number of highly acclaimed novels have been published as alternate histories, by authors ranging from science fiction bestsellers to Pulitzer Prize-winning literary icons. The success and popularity of the genre is reflected in its success on television with original concepts being developed alongside adaptations of iconic texts. This important collection of essays seeks to redress an imbalance between the importance and quality of alternate history texts and the available scholarship and critical readings of texts, providing chapters by both leading scholars in the field and rising stars. The chapters in this book acknowledge the long and distinctive history of the genre whilst also revelling in its vitality, adaptability, and contemporary relevance, with many of the chapters discussing late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century contemporary fiction texts which have received little or no sustained critical analysis elsewhere in print.