Community In Contemporary British Fiction

Examining how British writers are addressing the urgent matter of how we form and express group belonging in the 21st century, this book brings together a range of international scholars to explore the ongoing crises, developments and possibilities inherent in the task of representing community in the present. Including an extended critical introduction that positions the individual chapters in relation to broader conceptual questions, chapters combine close reading and engagement with the latest theories and concepts to engage with the complex regionalities of the United Kingdom, with representation of writers from all parts of the UK including Northern Ireland. Including specific focus on the most challenging issues for community in the past five years, notably Brexit and the Covid-19 crisis, with a broader understanding of themes of local and national belonging, this book offers detailed discussions of writers including Ali Smith, Niall Griffiths, John McGregor, Max Porter, Amanda Craig, Bernadine Evaristo, Jonathan Coe, Bernie McGill, Jan Carson, Guy Gunaratne, Anthony Cartright, Barney Farmer, Maggie Gee and Sarah Hall. Demonstrating some of the resources that literature can offer for a renewed understanding of community, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in how British Literature contributes to our understanding of society in both the past and present, and how such understanding can potentially help us to shape the future.

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.

The essays in this edited collection offer incisive and nuanced analyses of and insights into the state of British cities and urban environments in the twenty-first century. Britain’s experiences with industrialization, colonialism, post-colonialism, global capitalism, and the European Union (EU) have had a marked influence on British ideas about and British literature’s depiction of the city and urban contexts. Recent British fiction focuses in particular on cities as intertwined with globalization and global capitalism (including the proliferation of media) and with issues of immigration and migration. Indeed, decolonization has brought large numbers of people from former colonies to Britain, thus making British cities ever more diverse. Such mixing of peoples in urban areas has led to both racist fears and possibilities of cosmopolitan co-existence.

Contemporary writers such as Peter Ackroyd, J.G. Ballard, John King, Ian McEwan, Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Zadie Smith have been registering the changes to the social and cultural London landscape for years. This volume brings together their vivid representations of the capital. Uniting the readings are themes such as relationship between the country and the city; the capacity of satirical forms to encompass the 'real London'; spatio-temporal transformations and emergences; the relationship between multiculturalism and universalism; the underground as the spatial equivalent of London's unconsciousness and the suburbs as the frontier of the future. The volume creates a framework for new approaches to the representation of London required by the unprecedented social uncertainties of recent years: an invaluable contribution to studies of contemporary writing about London.

Throughout contemporary British writing, the question of national identity recurs. By means of its testimony to lived experience, the novel seems to offer the possibility of exploring local communities and marginalized identities in various elaborate ways. However, by its very metropolitanism, and as a result of the material circumstances of publishing and the cosmopolitan nature of the audience, the British novel inevitably conglomerates around London, and its exploration of the remainder of Britain has tended to be patchy and touristy.

This book is a concise and engaging analysis of contemporary literature viewed through the critical lens of cosmopolitan theory. It covers a wide spectrum of issues including globalisation, cosmopolitanism, nationhood, identity, philosophical nomadism, posthumanism, climate change, devolution and love.

The 'Marginal' as a concept has become an integral part of the British novel as it stands at the turn of the century. Both popular and literary fiction since the mid-1970s has seen an increasing emphasis on the marginal subject. This study offers readings of a wide range of contemporary British novels that represent characters or communities at the margin of society. Nicola Allen analyses three conceptual categories representing the marginal subject in the contemporary British novel: the character of the misfit or outsider; the emergence of the grotesque; and the rediscovery of previously marginalized narratives such as myth and fantasy. This innovative and original monograph focuses on the contention that the contemporary novel of marginality conveys a belief in the socially transformative powers of narrative, and suggests that narrative has played a central role in bringing marginal politics and marginal issues to the fore in contemporary Britain.

By examining the representation of urban space in contemporary British fiction, this book argues that key to the political left's strategy was a model of action which folded politics into culture and elevated disenfranchisement to the status of a political principle.