Contemporary Novelists : British Fiction, 1970-2003

by Childs, Peter

• ISBN13: 9781403911209
• ISBN10: 1403911207
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-03-02
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Peter Childs offers accessible analyses of the work of twelve prominent writers, including Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Zadie Smith and Jeanette Winterson. Focusing on their most-studied writings, Childs develops new readings of these authors' key novels, while the introduction explains the dominant concerns of British fiction from 1970-2003, the period's historical context, and the "state of fiction" at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Author Biography

Peter Childs is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Gloucestershire, UK. He is the author of a number of student texts in twentieth-century literature and culture including The Twentieth Century in Poetry (Routledge, 1998), Encyclopedia of Contemporary British Culture (Routledge, 1999), Reading Fiction: Opening the Text (Palgrave, 2001) and British Cultural Identities, 2e (Routledge, 2002, with Mike Storry).

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Novel Today and Yesterday	1	(22)
Timeline	23	(12)
Martin Amis: Lucre, Love, and Literature	35	(23)
Pat Barker: In the Shadow of Monstrosities	58	(22)
Julian Barnes: `A Mixture of Genres'	80	(20)
Angela Carter: The Demythologizing Business	100	(23)
Kazuo Ishiguro: Remain in Dreams	123	(18)
Hanif Kureishi: In Black and White	141	(19)
Ian McEwan: The Child in Us All	160	(20)
Salman Rushdie: A Long Geographical Perspective	180	(21)
Zadie Smith: Searching for the Inescapable	201	(16)
Graham Swift: Past Present	217	(20)
Irvine Welsh: Sex and Drugs and Violence	237	(18)
Jeanette Winterson: Boundaries and Desire	255	(19)
Conclusion: The Novel Today and Tomorrow	274	(8)
Index	282