Twenty-First Century Fiction

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

   PDF

2. Introduction: What Happens Now

   • Siân Adiseshiah, Rupert Hildyard

   Pages 1-14

3. ‘Such a Thing as Avant-Garde Has Ceased to Exist’: The Hidden Legacies of the British Experimental Novel

   • Jennifer Hodgson

   Pages 15-33

4. Tough Shit Erich Auerbach: Contingency and Estrangement in David Peace’s Occupied City and Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

   • Phil Redpath

   Pages 34-48

5. When the Two Sevens Clash: David Peace’s Nineteen Seventy-Seven as ‘Occult History’

   • Dean Lockwood

   Pages 49-65

6. Remaindered Books: Glen Duncan’s Twenty-First Century Novels

   • Alice Bennett

   Pages 66-80

7. ‘The journey creates us. We become the frontiers we cross’: Stepping Across Lines in Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown

   • Daniel O’Gorman

   Pages 81-96

8. ‘The Private Rooms and Public Haunts’: Theatricality and the City of London in Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White

   • Lin Pettersson

   Pages 97-114

9. ‘This is my Opa. Do you remember him killing the Jews?’ Rachel Seiffert’s ‘Micha’ and the Transgenerational Haunting of a Silenced Past

   • María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro

   Pages 115-131

10. A Voice without a Name: Gothic Homelessness in Ali Smith’s Hotel World and Trezza Azzopardi’s Remember Me

    • Emily Horton

    Pages 132-146

11. Ghosts of Postmodernity: Spectral Epistemology and Haunting in Hilary Mantel’s Fludd and Beyond Black

    • Wolfgang Funk

    Pages 147-161

12. Intimations of Immortality: Sémiologies of Ageing and the Lineaments of Eternity in Contemporary Prose

    • Lucy Perry

    Pages 162-182

13. Crosshatching: Boundary Crossing in the Post-Millennial British Boom

    • Jude Roberts

    Pages 183-196

14. ‘You just know when the world is about to break apart’: Utopia, Dystopia and New Global Uncertainties in Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army

    • Iain Robinson

    Pages 197-211

15. Finding the Right Kind of Attention: Dystopia and Transcendence in John Burnside’s Glister

    • Florian Niedlich

    Pages 212-223

16. Back Matter

    Pages 224-239

    PDF

This lively new volume of essays examines what happens now in 21st century fiction. Fresh theoretical approaches to writers such as Salman Rushdie, David Peace, Margaret Atwood, and Hilary Mantel, and identifications of 21st-century themes, tropes and styles combine to produce a timely critical intervention into genuinely contemporary fiction.

• fiction
• novel
• Romanticism
• British and Irish Literature

• University of Lincoln, UK

  Siân Adiseshiah, Rupert Hildyard

Alice Bennett, Liverpool Hope University, UK. Wolfgang Funk, Leibniz University Hanover, Germany Jennifer Hodgson, postgraduate researcher, Durham University, UK Emily Horton, Brunel University, UK. Dean Lockwood, University of Lincoln, UK María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro, University of Zaragoza, Spain Florian Niedlich, University of Würzburg, Germany Daniel O'Gorman, postgraduate researcher, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK Lucy Perry, An-Najah National University, Palestine Lin Pettersson, University of Málaga, Spain Phil Redpath, University of Lincoln, UK Jude Roberts, postgraduate researcher, University of Nottingham, UK Iain Robinson, University of East Anglia, UK

Policies and ethics