The 1990s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction

by Hubble, Nick; Tew, Philip; Wilson, Leigh; Wilson, Leigh; Hubble, Nick; Tew, Philip

• ISBN13: 9781350005419
• ISBN10: 135000541X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2017-10-19
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 1990s shape contemporary British Fiction?

From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the turn of the millennium, the 1990s witnessed a realignment of global politics. Against the changing international scene, this volume uses events abroad and in Britain to examine and explain the changes taking place in British fiction, including: the celebration of national identities, fuelled by the move toward political devolution in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales; the literary optimism in urban ethnic fictions written by a new generation of authors, born and raised in Britain; the popularity of neo-Victorian fiction.

Critical surveys are balanced by in-depth readings of work by the authors who defined the decade, including A.S. Byatt, Hanif Kureishi, Will Self, Caryl Phillips and Irvine Welsh: an approach that illustrates exactly how their key themes and concerns fit within the social and political circumstances of the decade.

Author Biography

Nick Hubble is Reader in English at Brunel University London, UK.

Philip Tew is Professor of English (Post-1900 Literature) at Brunel University London, UK, Director of Brunel's Centre for Contemporary Writing and Director of the Modern and Contemporary Fiction Studies Network.

Leigh Wilson is Reader in Modern Literature at the University of Westminster, UK.

Table of Contents

Series Introduction, Nick Hubble (Brunel University, UK), Philip Tew (Brunel University, UK) and Leigh Wilson (University of Westminster, UK)
Volume Introduction, Nick Hubble (Brunel University, UK), Philip Tew (Brunel University, UK) and Leigh Wilson (University of Westminster, UK)
1. Literary History of the Decade, Martyn Colebrook (University of Hull, UK)
2. Re-Writing National Identities in 1990s British Fiction, Nick Bentley (Keele University, UK)
3. The Misery Index: Memoir Boom and Bust in the 1990s, Claire Lynch (Brunel University, UK)
4. Postcolonial and Marginal Voices, Sara Upstone (Kingston University, UK)
5. Caught between the Short and Long Twentieth Centuries:Temporal Displacement in the Historical Fiction of the 1990s, Nick Hubble (Brunel University, UK)
6. The Subversive Revolution: British Experimental Fiction of the 1990s, Katy Shaw (University of Brighton, UK)
7. International Contexts I: Possessed by the Other: The Reception of British Neo-Victorian Fiction in America in the 1990s, Lynn Wells (University of Regina, Canada)
8. International Contexts II, Anja Müller-Wood (Johannes Gutenberg Universitat Mainz, Germany)
9. International Contexts III
10. International Contexts IV
Timeline
Brief Biographies
Bibliography
Index