Rethinking Race and Identity in Contemporary British Fiction
Rethinking Race and Identity in Contemporary British Fiction

Author: Sara Upstone

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-10-04

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1317914813

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This book takes a post-racial approach to the representation of race in contemporary British fiction, re-imagining studies of race and British literature away from concerns with specific racial groups towards a more sophisticated analysis of the contribution of a broad, post-racial British writing. Examining the work of writers from a wide range of diverse racial backgrounds, the book illustrates how contemporary British fiction, rather than merely reflecting social norms, is making a radical contribution towards the possible future of a positively multi-ethnic and post-racial Britain. This is developed by a strategic use of the realist form, which becomes a utopian device as it provides readers with a reality beyond current circumstances, yet one which is rooted within an identifiable world. Speaking to the specific contexts of British cultural politics, and directly connecting with contemporary debates surrounding race and identity in Britain, the author engages with a wide range of both mainstream and neglected authors, including Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Julian Barnes, John Lanchester, Alan Hollinghurst, Martin Amis, Jon McGregor, Andrea Levy, Bernardine Evaristo, Hanif Kureishi, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hari Kunzru, Nadeem Aslam, Meera Syal, Jackie Kay, Maggie Gee, and Neil Gaiman. This cutting-edge volume explores how contemporary fiction is at the centre of re-thinking how we engage with the question of race in twenty-first-century Britain.

Rethinking Race and Identity in Contemporary British Fiction
Rethinking Race and Identity in Contemporary British Fiction

Author: Sara Upstone

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-10-04

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1317914805

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This book takes a post-racial approach to the representation of race in contemporary British fiction, re-imagining studies of race and British literature away from concerns with specific racial groups towards a more sophisticated analysis of the contribution of a broad, post-racial British writing. Examining the work of writers from a wide range of diverse racial backgrounds, the book illustrates how contemporary British fiction, rather than merely reflecting social norms, is making a radical contribution towards the possible future of a positively multi-ethnic and post-racial Britain. This is developed by a strategic use of the realist form, which becomes a utopian device as it provides readers with a reality beyond current circumstances, yet one which is rooted within an identifiable world. Speaking to the specific contexts of British cultural politics, and directly connecting with contemporary debates surrounding race and identity in Britain, the author engages with a wide range of both mainstream and neglected authors, including Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Julian Barnes, John Lanchester, Alan Hollinghurst, Martin Amis, Jon McGregor, Andrea Levy, Bernardine Evaristo, Hanif Kureishi, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hari Kunzru, Nadeem Aslam, Meera Syal, Jackie Kay, Maggie Gee, and Neil Gaiman. This cutting-edge volume explores how contemporary fiction is at the centre of re-thinking how we engage with the question of race in twenty-first-century Britain.

Rethinking Contemporary British Women’s Writing
Rethinking Contemporary British Women’s Writing

Author: Emilie Walezak

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-08-26

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 1350171360

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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.

Community in Contemporary British Fiction
Community in Contemporary British Fiction

Author: Sara Upstone

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-10-20

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1350244031

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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.

Biofictions
Biofictions

Author: Josie Gill

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-02-20

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 1350099856

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This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Winner of the 2020 British Society for Literature and Science book prize. In this important interdisciplinary study, Josie Gill explores how the contemporary novel has drawn upon, and intervened in, debates about race in late 20th and 21st century genetic science. Reading works by leading contemporary writers including Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Octavia Butler and Colson Whitehead, Biofictions demonstrates how ideas of race are produced at the intersection of science and fiction, which together create the stories about identity, racism, ancestry and kinship which characterize our understanding of race today. By highlighting the role of narrative in the formation of racial ideas in science, this book calls into question the apparent anti-racism of contemporary genetics, which functions narratively, rather than factually or objectively, within the racialized contexts in which it is embedded. In so doing, Biofictions compels us to rethink the long-asked question of whether race is a biological fact or a fiction, calling instead for a new understanding of the relationship between race, science and fiction.

Brexit and Literature
Brexit and Literature

Author: Robert Eaglestone

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-03-09

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1351203177

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Brexit is a political, economic and administrative event: and it is a cultural one, too. In Brexit and Literature, Robert Eaglestone brings together a diverse range of literary scholars, writers and poets to respond to this aspect of Brexit. The discipline of ‘English’, as the very name suggests, is concerned with cultural and national identity: literary studies has always addressed ideas of nationalism and the wider political process. With the ramifications of Brexit expected to last for decades to come, Brexit and Literature offers the first academic study of its impact on and through the humanities. Including a preface from Baroness Young of Hornsey, Brexit and Literature is a bold and unapologetic volume, focusing on the immediate effects of the divisive referendum while meditating on its long-term impact.

Maximalism in Contemporary American Literature
Maximalism in Contemporary American Literature

Author: Nick Levey

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-11-18

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 1317205030

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This book begins a new and foundational discussion of maximalism by investigating how the treatment of detail in contemporary literature impels readers to navigate, tolerate, and enrich the cultural landscape of postindustrial America. It studies the maximalist novels of David Foster Wallace, Nicholson Baker, Thomas Pynchon, and others, considering how overly-detailed writing serves the institutional, emotional, and intellectual needs of contemporary readers and writers. The book argues that maximalist novels not only exceed perceived limits of style, subject matter, and scope, but strive to remake the usefulness of books in contemporary culture, refreshing the act of reading. Levey shows that while these novels are preoccupied with detail and description, they are relatively unconcerned with the traditional goals of representation. Instead, they use detail to communicate particular values and fantasies of intelligence, enthusiasm, and ability attached to the management of complex and excessive information. Whether reinvigorating the banal and trivial in mainstream culture, or soothing anxieties of human insufficiency in the age of automation and the internet, these texts model significant abilities, rather than just objects of significance, and encourage readers to develop habits of reading that complement the demands of an increasingly detailed culture. Drawing upon a diverse range of theoretical schools and cultural texts, including Thing Theory, Marxism, New Formalism, playlists, blogs, and archival manuscripts, the book proposes a new understanding of maximalist writing and a new way of approaching the usefulness of literary objects in contemporary culture.

The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing
The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing

Author: Susheila Nasta

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-01-16

Total Pages: 862

ISBN-13: 1108169007

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The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing provides a comprehensive historical overview of the diverse literary traditions impacting on this field's evolution, from the eighteenth century to the present. Drawing on the expertise of over forty international experts, this book gathers innovative scholarship to look forward to new readings and perspectives, while also focusing on undervalued writers, texts, and research areas. Creating new pathways to engage with the naming of a field that has often been contested, readings of literary texts are interwoven throughout with key political, social, and material contexts. In making visible the diverse influences constituting past and contemporary British literary culture, this Cambridge History makes a unique contribution to British, Commonwealth, postcolonial, transnational, diasporic, and global literary studies, serving both as one of the first major reference works to cover four centuries of black and Asian British literary history and as a compass for future scholarship.

The clamour of nationalism
The clamour of nationalism

Author: Sivamohan Valluvan

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2019-07-26

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 152612615X

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Nationalism has reasserted itself today as the political force of our times, remaking European politics wherever one looks. Britain is no exception, and in the midst of Brexit, it has even become a vanguard of nationalism’s confident return to the mainstream. Intellectual attempts to account for nationalism’s resurgence have however floundered. Desperately trying to read nationalism through one overarching cause – as capitalist crisis, as cultural backlash, or as social media led anti-Establishment politics – these accounts have proven woefully inadequate. This book argues that the only way to understand nationalism is through nationalism itself. To understand it as the key force of modernity that calls upon all existing ideological traditions in asserting its appeal: whether it is liberal, conservative, neoliberal or left-wing. This ideological clamour that characterises today’s British nationalism requires both recognition and theorisation. A meaningful understanding of new nationalism must reckon with the ideological range animating it and the deeply hostile aversion to different racial minorities that pervades its respective ideologies. Drawing on a variety of cultural and political themes – ranging from Corbyn’s dithering, the cult of Churchillism, the neoliberal fixation with a ‘point-system’ immigration policy, the muscular secularism of Richard Dawkins and friends, fears that the white working class have ‘become black’, and even simply the strange appeal of Harry Potter and Game of Thrones – this book provides a dazzling but always detailed study of how nationalism is the politics of today only because it is a politics of everything.

The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit
The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit

Author: Heike Missler

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-11-03

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1317235320

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Chick lit is the marketing label attributed to a surge of books published in the wake of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) and Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City (1997). Branded by their pink or pastel-coloured book covers, chick-lit novels have been a highly successful and ubiquitous product of women's popular culture since the late 1990s. This study traces the evolution of chick lit not only as a genre of popular fiction, but as a cultural phenomenon. It complicates the genealogy of the texts by situating them firmly in the context of age-old debates about female literary creation, and by highlighting the dynamics of the popular-fiction market. Offering a convincing dissection of the formula which lies at the heart of chick lit, as well as in-depth analyses of a number of chick-lit titles ranging from classic to more recent and edgier texts, this book yields new insights into a relatively young field of academic study. Its close readings provide astute assessments of chick lit's notoriously skewed representational politics, especially with regard to sexuality and ethnicity, which feed into current discussions about postfeminism. Moreover, the study makes a unique contribution to the scholarly debate of chick lit by including an analysis of the (online) fan communities the genre has fostered. The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit weaves a sound methodological network, drawing on reader-response criticism; feminist, gender, and queer theory; affect studies; and whiteness studies. This book is an accessible and engaging study for anyone interested in postfeminism and popular culture.