This work is a collection of stories from young novelists. Inspired by the Dogme 95 group of film makers including Lars von Trier and Harmonie Korine, the New Puritans are attempting to rediscover fiction as a discipline rather than a category.
In the year 2000, two young editors, Nicholas Blincoe and Matt Thorne, published All Hail the New Puritans, an anthology of short stories which created an impact in the somewhat faded literary scene of Britain at the turn of the millennium. The stories themselves, written by 15 young English writers (Scarlett Thomas, Alex Garland, Ben Richards, Nicholas Blincoe, Candida Clark, Daren King, Geoff Dyer, Matt Thorne, Anna Davis, Bo Fowler, Matthew Branton, Simon Lewis, Tony White, Toby Litt and Rebbecca Ray), together with the editors' manifesto, offered a new and stimulating approach to fiction, although the whole project had an outrageous reception by the literary establishment. For the first time, a collection of essays addresses the importance of the New Puritan movement and provides guidelines to understand this generation of writers.
In this introduction to post-war fiction in Britain, Dominic Head shows how the novel yields a special insight into the important areas of social and cultural history in the second half of the twentieth century. Head's study is the most exhaustive survey of post-war British fiction available. It includes chapters on the state and the novel, class and social change, gender and sexual identity, national identity and multiculturalism. Throughout Head places novels in their social and historical context. He highlights the emergence and prominence of particular genres and links these developments to the wider cultural context. He also provides provocative readings of important individual novelists, particularly those who remain staple reference points in the study of the subject. Accessible, wide-ranging and designed specifically for use on courses, this is the most current introduction to the subject available. An invaluable resource for students and teachers alike.
A detailed examination of the growing genre of British fiction featuring archives and archival research, from A.S. Byatt's Booker Prize-winning Possession to the paperback thrillers of popular novelists.
Provides a comprehensive reference to short fiction from Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Commonwealth, featuring some of the most popular writers and works.
Almost without anybody noticing, a new cultural paradigm has come center stage, displacing an exhausted and increasingly marginalised postmodernism. Dr. Alan Kirby calls this cultural paradigm digimodernism, a name comprising both its central technical mode and its privileging of the fingers and thumbs in its use. The increasing irrelevancy of postmodernism requires a new theory to underpin our current digital culture.
Writers Talk includes interviews with Kate Atkinson, Pat Barker, Jonathan Coe, Jim Crace, Toby Litt, Graham Swift, Matt Thorne, David Mitchell, AlanWarner, and Will Self. "Is it a good time to be a writer in the time of The Da Vinci Code? It's not necessarily good time to be a literary writer."-Kate Atkinson "The best novels allow us to rehearse the world ahead of us, to play out the battle before we fight it, to experience disaster before we encounter it, to practice grief before it flattens us. Narrative is useful. It confers advantages on us as a species." -Jim Crace Why do writers write? How do they react to criticism of their work? What inspires them and how do go about working? Does fiction have any political, ethical or spiritual significance? Can we learn more about a book from its author? This collection of interviews with contemporary British novelists offers a fascinating insight into bestselling authors' views on fiction today; their influences and themes; readers and critics; why they write and their writing process; and provides a snapshot of the reality of living as a writer.
In Pop-Feminist Narratives, Emily Spiers explores the recent phenomenon of 'pop-feminism' and pop-feminist writing across North America, Britain, and Germany. Pop-feminism is characterised by its engagement with popular culture and consumerism; its preoccupation with sexuality and transgression in relation to female agency; and its thematisation of intergenerational feminist discord, portrayed either as a damaging discursive construct or as a verifiable phenomenon requiring remediation. Central to this volume is the question of theorising the female subject in a postfeminist neoliberal climate and the role played by genre and narrative in the articulation of contemporary pop-feminist politics. The heightened visibility of mainstream feminist discourse and feminist activism in recent years—especially in North America, Britain, and Germany—means that the time is ripe for a coherent comparative scholarly study of pop-feminism as a transnational phenomenon. This volume provides such an account of pop-feminism in a manner which takes into account the varied and complex narrative strategies employed in the telling of pop-feminist stories across multiple genres and platforms, including pop-literary fiction, the popular 'guide' to feminism, film, music, and the digital.