Contemporary Crisis Fictions Affect and Ethics in the Modern British Novel

by Horton, Emily

• ISBN13: 9781137350190
• ISBN10: 1137350199
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-07-08
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Contemporary Crisis Fictions offers a significant statement about the contemporary British novel in relation to three authors: Graham Swift, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. All writing at the forefront of a generation, these authors sought to resuscitate the novel's ethico-political credentials, at a time which did not seem conducive to such a project. Thus, in a country often understood in terms of its aggressive individualism, consumer competition, and persistent nationalism, my claim for these writers is that, in addition to responding to this problematic context, they also work to establish a cosmopolitan ethics of interpersonal responsibility and cross-cultural awareness that is deeply relevant to contemporary British life. In part, this is a response to the gaps in past criticism, which repeatedly prioritises issues of textual self-consciousness over social and ethical concerns. Nevertheless, Contemporary Crisis Fictions celebrates these authors' writing on its own terms, highlighting the dialogical relationships each oeuvre establishes between local and global identity, as a means of approaching the 'structure of feeling' that links these works.

Author Biography

Emily Horton is a visiting lecturer in English Literature at Brunel University, University of Greenwich, UK and Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. Her research interests include contemporary British and American fiction, specializing in trauma fiction; contemporary genre and popular fiction; and contemporary explorations of globalisation and cosmopolitanism. She has recently co-edited two volumes: Ali Smith, with Monica Germanà (2013), and The 1980s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, with Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson (2014).

Table of Contents

Introduction: Contemporary Crisis Fiction: A New Approach to the Writing of Graham Swift, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro
1.Contemporary Crisis Fiction: Constructing a New Genre
2.Curiosity and Civilisation: Reassessments of History in the Fiction of Graham Swift.
3.Reassessing the Two-Culture Debate: Popular Science in the Fiction of Ian McEwan
4.Shifting Perspectives and Alternate Landscapes: Culture and Cultural Politics in the Fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro
Epilogue: A Review of Contemporary Crisis Fiction with an Emphasis on Overlap Between the Works at a Discursive Level
Bibliography
Index