London post-2010 in British Literature and Culture explores cultural and literary representations of London since around 2010 and focuses on a period in which a string of celebratory national and global media events, but also riots and anti-capitalist protests have cemented London’s status as a paradigmatic world city. This collection of articles brings together a wide variety of topics, such as the 2011 London riots, the London Olympics of 2012, royal festivities, the Tube anniversary, memorials, and London in recent novels and blockbuster films. The contributions look at the way in which cultural and literary texts articulate competing versions of the contemporary city, oscillating between either supporting or subverting the hegemonic narrative of London as a place of cosmopolitan harmony and inclusion.
How has Europe shaped British literature and culture – and vice versa – since the Middle Ages? This volume offers nuanced answers to this question. From the High Renaissance to haute cuisine, from the Republic of Letters to the European Union, from the Black Death to Brexit -- the reader gains insights into the main geographical zones of influence, shared intellectual movements, indicative modes of cultural transfer and more recent conflicts that have left their mark on the British-European relationship. The story that emerges from this long history of cultural interactions is much more complex than its most recent political episode might suggest. This volume offers indispensable contexts to the manifold and longstanding connections between British and European literature and culture. This book suggests that, however the political landscape develops, we will do well to bear this exceptionally rich history in mind.
Looking at writers such as Will Self, Hani Kureishi, JG Ballard, and Iain Sinclair, Kim Duff's new book examines contemporary British literature and its depiction of the city after the time of Thatcher and mass privatization. This lively study is an important and engaging work for students and scholars alike.
The First World War has given rise to a multifaceted cultural production like no other historical event. This handbook surveys British literature and film about the war from 1914 until today. The continuing interest in World War I highlights the interdependence of war experience, the imaginative re-creation of that experience in writing, and individual as well as collective memory. In the first part of the handbook, the major genres of war writing and film are addressed, including of course poetry and the novel, but also the short story; furthermore, it is shown how our conception of the Great War is broadened when looked at from the perspective of gender studies and post-colonial criticism. The chapters in the second part present close readings of important contributions to the literary and filmic representation of World War I in Great Britain. All in all, the contributions demonstrate how the opposing forces of focusing and canon-formation on the one hand, and broadening and revision of the canon on the other, have characterised British literature and culture of the First World War.
"Post-World War II mass migration to Great Britain altered its demographic composition more markedly than in any other period in its history, resulting in a modern multicultural nation state shaped by the ethnic diversity of its citizenry. Populations from African, Caribbean, and South Asian locations arriving in Britain post-war brought diasporic sensibilities and literary heritages that have profoundly transformed British national culture, leading to a more complex and inclusive sense of its past. The Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945-2010) examines the creative impact of this rich infusion upon English literature against the backdrop of the seismic social and economic changes triggered by colonialism and migration, multiculturalism, and contemporary globalization"--
Contemporary Indian English Literature focuses on the recent history of Indian literature in English since the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children (1981), a watershed moment for Indian writing in English in the global literary landscape. The chapters in this volume consider a wide range of poets, novelists, short fiction writers and dramatists who have notably contributed to the proliferation of Indian literature in English from the late 20th century to the present. The volume provides an introduction to current developments in Indian English literature and explains general ideas, as well as the specific features and styles of selected writers from this wide spectrum. It addresses students working in this field at university level, and includes thorough reading lists and study questions to encourage students to read, reflect on and write about Indian English literature critically.
This book explores how British culture is negotiating heroes and heroisms in the twenty-first century. It posits a nexus between the heroic and the state of the nation and explores this idea through British television drama. Drawing on case studies including programmes such as The Last Kingdom, Spooks, Luther and Merlin, the book explores the aesthetic strategies of heroisation in television drama and contextualises the programmes within British public discourses at the time of their production, original broadcasting and first reception. British television drama is a cultural forum in which contemporary Britain’s problems, wishes and cultural values are revealed and debated. By revealing the tensions in contemporary notions of heroes and heroisms, television drama employs the heroic as a lens through which to scrutinise contemporary British society and its responses to crisis and change. Looking back on the development of heroic representations in British television drama over the last twenty years, this book’s analyses show how heroisation in television drama reacts to, and reveals shifts in, British structures of feeling in a time marked by insecurity. The book is ideal for readers interested in British cultural studies, studies of the heroic and popular culture. Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution (CC-BY-)] 4.0 license.
“Dr Cecilia Acquarone’s perceptive analysis of liminality in British postcolonial fiction from a gender perspective constitutes an innovative, thought-provoking and crystal-clear study of female ‘versus’ male responses to the challenges of postmodernity as exemplified by significant British postcolonial writers. The book can be justly praised for the lucid use of theoretical language and the exploration of modern and postmodern ideology in an unobstrusive form, pinpointing the most significant phenomena related to the topic in question. Dr Acquarone locates the relevance of barriers, borders and crossings with gender on the agenda within the realm of tragedy and comedy, providing a sensible and sensitive humanistic approach to the works of some of the most outstanding authors of British postcolonial fiction. In sum, Cecilia Acquarone’s book is undoubtedly an invaluable contribution to the field of British postcolonial studies.” —Dr Antonio Ballesteros-Gonzalez, Spanish Open University “Cecilia Acquarone’s Barriers, Borders and Crossing in British Postcolonial Fiction: A Gender Perspective is a particularly interesting contribution to the field of postcolonial criticism due to its perceptive intertwining of a sound theoretical background and a sensitive close reading of representative novels by major writers of contemporary multicultural Britain. … In a clear prose, she sheds light on highly complex philosophical and sociological issues, expounding on what the feminine and the masculine perspective can contribute to the hard task of peaceful coexistence in contemporary British multicultural society.” —Ángeles de la Concha, Catedrática de Filología Inglesa, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia “Barriers, Borders and Crossing in British Postcolonial Fiction: A Gender Perspective provides an original attempt to map an increasingly visible body of writing in the UK in recent years. In her analysis of key novels by black and Asian British writers … the author highlights an opposition between the predominantly tragic vision of life of the male authors and the fundamentally comic vision of life found in the women writers. … The author offers a provocative reading of recent black and Asian British fiction as postmodernist works in which the writers respond differently to contemporary conditions. The volume is a significant contribution to the field of postcolonial studies and diaspora studies, and its use of the comedy-tragedy paradigm to understand recent fiction enriches more common approaches to the two major ways of experiencing and discussing diaspora.” —Dr Sofía Muñoz-Valdivieso, Associate Professor, University of Malaga
This is the first in-depth study of post-war female religious life. It draws on archival materials and a remarkable set of eighty interviews to place Catholic sisters and nuns at the heart of the turbulent 1960s, integrating their story of social change into a larger British and international one. Shedding new light on how religious bodies engaged in modernisation, it addresses themes such as the Modern Girl and youth culture, ‘1968’, generational discourse, post-war modernity, the voluntary sector and the women’s movement. Women religious were at the forefront of the Roman Catholic Church’s movement of adaptation and renewal towards the world. This volume tells their stories in their own words.
