This study examines the importance of space for the way contemporary novelists experiment with style and form, offering an account of how British writers from the past three decades have engaged with landscape description as a catalyst for innovation. David James considers the work of more than fifteen major British novelists to offer a wide-ranging and accessible commentary on the relationship between landscape and narrative design, demonstrating an approach to the geography of contemporary fiction enriched by the practice of aesthetic criticism. Moving between established and emerging novelists, the book reveals that spatial poetics allow us to chart distinctive and surprising affinities between practitioners, showing how writers today compel us to pay close attention to technique when linking the depiction of physical places to new developments in novelistic craft.
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.
This study investigates the figure of haunting in the New Nature Writing. It begins with a historical survey of nature writing and traces how it came to represent an ideal of ‘natural’ space as empty of human history and social conflict. Building on a theoretical framework which combines insights from ecocriticism and spatial theory, the author explores the spatial dimensions of haunting and ‘hauntology’ and shows how 21st-century writers draw on a Gothic repertoire of seemingly supernatural occurrences and spectral imagery to portray ‘natural’ space as disturbed, uncanny and socially contested. Iain Sinclair and Robert Macfarlane are revealed to apply psychogeography’s interest in ‘hidden histories’ and haunted places to spaces associated with ‘wilderness’ and ‘the countryside’. Kathleen Jamie’s allusions to the Gothic are put in relation to her feminist re-writing of ‘the outdoors’, and John Burnside’s use of haunting is shown to dismantle fictions of ‘the far north’. This book provides not only a discussion of a wide range of factual and fictional narratives of the present but also an analysis of the intertextual dialogue with the Romantic tradition which enfolds in these texts.
Providing close readings of well-known British realist writers including Pat Barker, A. S. Byatt, Rose Tremain, Sarah Hall, Bernadine Evaristo and Zadie Smith, this book uses new directions in material and posthuman feminism to examine how contemporary women writers explore the challenges we collectively face today. Walezak redresses negative assumptions about realism's alleged conservatism and demonstrates the vitality and relevance of the realist genre in experimenting with the connections between individual and collective voices, human and non-human meditations, local and global scales, and author and reader. Considering how contemporary realist writing is attuned to pressing issues including globalization, climate change, and interconnectivity, this book provides innovative new ways of reading realism, examines how these writers are looking to reinvent the genre, and shows how realism helps reimagine our place in the world.
Examination Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Paderborn, language: English, abstract: [...] This thesis will start with some general assumptions on spatiality in literature and outline its importance for (detective) fiction. The focus will be on the concepts of space and place by de Certeau, Lefebvre and Lotman. Afterwards, in the subchapter on the geographical and physical context, crucial dichotomies of space which have an influence on detective novels will be examined, especially the distinction between open and enclosed spaces. The chapter that follows will deal with three concrete novels of different eras to explore the representation of Devon with regard to the specific dichotomy mentioned above. Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and Agatha Christie’s novel The Sittaford Mystery (1931) both depict Devon in the early and middle twentieth century while Simon Beckett’s The Calling of the Grave (2010) shows a contemporary idea of how this region is perceived. A comparative analysis of these three novels will follow in order to point out the similarities and differences of Devon-spaces, as well as to underline how they together create its overall image. In this way, this chapter shows that new inventions have only changed this location and its perception at the surface but not in its core. Since there are many adaptations of Doyle’s novel, the fourth chapter will take a closer look at two medial representations of Devon and compare the literary with the medial space. The popular film adaptation by Lanfield from 1939 and an episode of the BBC Series Sherlock, a reimagining, contemporary update of Doyle’s classic, will serve as examples. Although many aspects of the adaptations could be compared to the novel, the interest will primarily be in the cinematographic realisation of spaces. Furthermore, the question of how far these spaces coincide with the image of Devon created by literature will be discussed. Subsequently, the conclusion will finally summarise the findings of this thesis and suggest possibilities to expand the topic of British detective fiction and Devon-spaces.
This is a comprehensive and definitive study of the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist, Howard Jacobson. It offers lucid, detailed and nuanced readings of each of Jacobson’s novels, and makes a powerful case for the importance of his work in the landscape of contemporary fiction. Focusing on the themes of comedy, masculinity and Jewishness, the book emphasises the richness and diversity of Jacobson’s work. Often described by others as ‘the English Philip Roth’ and by himself as ‘the Jewish Jane Austen’, Jacobson emerges here as a complex and often contradictory figure: a fearless novelist; a combative public intellectual; a polemical journalist; an unapologetic elitist and an irreverent outsider; an exuberant iconoclast and a sombre satirist. Never afraid of controversy, Jacobson tends to polarise readers; but love him or hate him, he is difficult to ignore. This book gives him the thorough consideration and the balanced evaluation that he deserves.
This book acknowledges that the reader of a novel looks at and sees the page before they begin to read any text placed upon it. Thus, any disruptions to how a traditional page 'should look' can have a large impact on the reading process. The book critically engages with the visual appearance of graphically innovative contemporary prose fiction.
By situating a range of contemporary literary texts against the backdrop of the legacies of a vast rural network of empire, this book collectively critiques not only the rural heritage industry of the 1980s in Britain but also the effect of neocolonial globalisation on postcolonial rural spaces.
In this volume, scholars from a wide range of fields within the humanities explore the links between space and place and their relation to cultural expression. This collection shows that a focus on the spatial can help elucidate important facets of symbolic expression and cultural production, whether it be literature, music, dance, films, or art.
