London in Contemporary British Fiction The City Beyond the City

by Hubble, Nick; Tew, Philip; Phillips, Lawrence; Beaumont, Matthew

• ISBN13: 9781441190192
• ISBN10: 1441190198
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2016-07-28
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Contemporary writers such as Peter Ackroyd, J.G. Ballard, John King, Ian McEwan, Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Zadie Smith have been registering the changes to the social and cultural London landscape for years. This volume brings together their vivid representations of the capital.

Uniting the readings are themes such as relationship between the country and the city; the capacity of satirical forms to encompass the 'real London'; spatio-temporal transformations and emergences; the relationship between multiculturalism and universalism; the underground as the spatial equivalent of London's unconsciousness and the suburbs as the frontier of the future. The volume creates a framework for new approaches to the representation of London required by the unprecedented social uncertainties of recent years: an invaluable contribution to studies of contemporary writing about London.

Author Biography

Nick Hubble is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary English Literature at Brunel University, UK.

Lynn Wells is Associate Professor of English and Associate Vice-President (Academic) at the University of Regina in Canada. She specializes in contemporary British fiction, especially London fiction, and literary ethics and is author of Allegories of Telling: Self-Referential Narrative in Contemporary British Fiction (2003) amd Ian McEwan (2009).

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

Table of Contents

Introduction, Nick Hubble (Brunel University, UK) and Lynn Wells (University of Regina, Canada)
Notes on Contributors
1. The Country in the City: Rural Evocations in Ian McEwan's London, Lynn Wells (University of Regina, Canada)
2. Mind the Gap: City and Country in Ali Smith's The Accidental, Susan Alice Fischer (Medgar Evers College, City University of New York, USA)
3. London Pastoral: Will Self's The Book of Dave, Philip Tew (Brunel University, UK)
4. The Changingman: Masculinity, Violence and Revenge in Martin Amis's Yellow Dog, Nick Bentley (Keele University, UK)
5. Peter Ackroyd's London: The Sacredness of Space and Time, Tomasz Niedokos (John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland)
6. London's Museum Spaces in the Works of A.S. Byatt and Peter Ackroyd, Doris Bremm (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
7. Chaos Theory and States Between in Sinclair's London, Laura Colombino (University of Genoa, Italy)
8. Feeling London Globally: The Location of Emotions in White Teeth, Susan Jung Su (National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan)
9. Multicultural Haven or Polyphonic Dystopia? The Conflicted London of Andrea Levy's Small World, Anja Müller-Wood (Johannes Gutenberg Universitat Mainz, Germany)
10. The Liminality of Underground London, Nora Alexandra Pleßke (University of Passau, Germany)
11. John King's Satellite Cycle, Paul McGarry
12. 'Between a Tired Past and a Future Without Illusions': The M25 as Ballardian Frontier, Nick Hubble (Brunel University, UK)
Index