Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction

Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction
Author: E. Rousselot
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2014-11-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137375205

This collection of essays is dedicated to examining the recent literary phenomenon of the 'neo-historical' novel, a sub-genre of contemporary historical fiction which critically re-imagines specific periods of history.

Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction

Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction
Author: E. Rousselot
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2014-11-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137375205

This collection of essays is dedicated to examining the recent literary phenomenon of the 'neo-historical' novel, a sub-genre of contemporary historical fiction which critically re-imagines specific periods of history.

Contemporary British Fiction

Contemporary British Fiction
Author: Nick Bentley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2017-11-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350309028

This essential guide provides a comprehensive survey of the most important debates in the criticism and research of contemporary British fiction. Nick Bentley analyses the criticism surrounding a range of British novelists including Monica Ali, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Alan Hollinghurst, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Sarah Waters and Jeanette Winterson. Exploring experiments with literary form, this authoritative book considers cutting-edge concerns relating to the neo-historical novel, the relationship between literature and science, literary geographies, and trauma narratives. Engaging with key literary theories, and identifying present trends and future directions in the literary criticism of contemporary British fiction, this is an invaluable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of English literature, teachers, researchers and scholars.

Conflict and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction

Conflict and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction
Author: Hsu-Ming Teo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2024-06-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1040085415

This book explores how postmillennial Anglophone women writers use romantic narrativisations of history to explore, revise, repurpose and challenge the past in their novels, exposing the extent to which past societies were damaging to women by instead imagining alternative histories. The novelists discussed employ the generic conventions of romance to narrate their understanding of historical and contemporary injustice and to reflect upon women’s achievements and the price they paid for autonomy and a life of public purpose. The volume seeks, firstly, to discuss the work of revision or reparation being performed by romantic historical fiction and, secondly, to analyse how the past is being repurposed for use in the present. It contends that the discourses and genre of romance work to provide a reparative reading of the past, but there are limitations and entrenched problems in such readings.

Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Author: Christoph Reinfandt
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 613
Release: 2017-06-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110369486

The Handbook systematically charts the trajectory of the English novel from its emergence as the foremost literary genre in the early twentieth century to its early twenty-first century status of eccentric eminence in new media environments. Systematic chapters address ̒The English Novel as a Distinctly Modern Genreʼ, ̒The Novel in the Economy’, ̒Genres’, ̒Gender’ (performativity, masculinities, feminism, queer), and ̒The Burden of Representationʼ (class and ethnicity). Extended contextualized close readings of more than twenty key texts from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) to Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015) supplement the systematic approach and encourage future research by providing overviews of reception and theoretical perspectives.

Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction

Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction
Author: Julia Novak
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2022-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3031090195

This volume addresses the current boom in biographical fictions across the globe, examining the ways in which gendered lives of the past become re-imagined as gendered narratives in fiction. Building on this research, this book is the first to address questions of gender in a sustained and systematic manner that is also sensitive to cultural and historical differences in both raw material and fictional reworking. It develops a critical lens through which to approach biofictions as ‘fictions of gender’, drawing on theories of biofiction and historical fiction, life-writing studies, feminist criticism, queer feminist readings, postcolonial studies, feminist art history, and trans studies. Attentive to various approaches to fictionalisation that reclaim, appropriate or re-invent their ‘raw material’, the volume assesses the critical, revisionist and deconstructive potential of biographical fictions while acknowledging the effects of cliché, gender norms and established narratives in many of the texts under investigation. The introduction of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed

The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed
Author: Ina Bergmann
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2020-12-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000295702

The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed: The New Historical Fiction explores the renaissance of the American historical novel at the turn of the twenty-first century. The study examines the revision of nineteenth-century historical events in cultural products against the background of recent theoretical trends in American studies. It combines insights of literary studies with scholarship on popular culture. The focus of representation is the long nineteenth century – a period from the early republic to World War I – as a key epoch of the nation-building project of the United States. The study explores the constructedness of historical tradition and the cultural resonance of historical events within the discourse on the contemporary novel and the theory formation surrounding it. At the center of the discussion are the unprecedented literary output and critical as well as popular success of historical fiction in the USA since 1995. An additional postcolonial and transatlantic perspective is provided by the incorporation of texts by British and Australian authors and especially by the inclusion of insights from neo-Victorian studies. The book provides a critical comment on current and topical developments in American literature, culture, and historiography.

The 2010s

The 2010s
Author: Emily Horton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2024-02-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350268232

This volume relates the British fiction of the decade to the contexts in which it was written and received in order to examine and explain contemporary trends, such as the rise of a new working-class fiction, the ongoing development of separate national literatures of Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and shifts in modes of attention and reading. From the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crash to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020, the 2010s have been a decade of an ongoing crisis which has penetrated every area of everyday life. Internationally, there has been an ongoing shift of global power from the US to China, and events and developments such as the election of Donald Trump as US President, the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the rise of the populist right across Europe and very gradually the incipient effects variously of AI. Nationally, there has been a decade of austerity economics punctuated by divisive referendums on Scottish independence and whether Britain should leave or remain in the EU. Balancing critical surveys with in-depth readings of work by authors who have helped define this turbulent decade, including Nicola Barker, Anna Burns, Jonathan Coe, Alys Conran, Bernadine Evaristo, Mohsin Hamid, James Kelman, James Robertson, Kamila Shamsie, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith and Adam Thirlwell, among others, this volume illustrates exactly how their key themes and concerns fit within the social and political circumstances of the decade.

Japanese Imperialism in Contemporary English Fiction

Japanese Imperialism in Contemporary English Fiction
Author: Ching-chih Wang
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 91
Release: 2019-11-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9811504628

This book considers literary images of Japan created by David Mitchell, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Tan Twan Eng to examine the influence of Japanese imperialism and its legacy at a time when culture was appropriated as route to governmentality and violence justified as root to peace. Using David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Tan Twang Eng’s The Garden of the Evening Mists and Kazuo Ishiguro’s work to examine Japanese militarists’ tactics of usurpation and how Japanese imperialism reached out to the grass-root public and turned into a fundamental belief in colonial invasion and imperial expansion, the book provides an in depth study of trauma, memory and war. From studying the rise of Japanese imperialism to Japan’s legitimization of colonial invasion, in addition to the devastating consequences of imperialism on both the colonizers and the colonized, the book provides a literary, discursive context to re-examine the forces of civilization which will appeal to all those interested in diasporic literature and postcolonial discourse, and the continued relevance of literature in understanding memory, legacy and war.

Crime Fiction in the Age of #MeToo

Crime Fiction in the Age of #MeToo
Author: Charlotte Beyer
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 136
Release: 2024-11-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1785278576

Informed by fourth-wave feminism, Crime Fiction in the Age of #MeToo presents a compelling and timely reading of crime fiction in the age of #MeToo. The book explores five major fourth-wave feminist topics, #MeToo, rape culture, toxic masculinity, LBGTQ+ perspectives, and transgender. These topics have been the subject of intense feminist scrutiny and campaigning, and the book demonstrates how this attention is reflected in contemporary crime fiction and its generic and thematic preoccupations. The book opens with a chapter presenting an overview of existing critical perspectives and feminist debates, demonstrating how fourth-wave feminist ideas and debates are inspiring innovations in the genre, as well as generating fresh ways of reading past and present crime fictions. Providing an overview and context for both fourth-wave feminism and the #MeToo movement, the chapter establishes the critical and cultural framework for its analysis. The chapter also outlines the book’s methodology and approach, detailing the contents of the chapters. Each of the five subsequent chapters uses critical vocabulary and concepts from feminism and the #MeToo movement to reassess canonical works and present new readings of contemporary crime fiction, producing compelling analyses of gender and genre. Canonical authors whose works are discussed include Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Josephine Tey, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, and Val McDermid. Examining selected contemporary novels and short stories, the chapters in Crime Fiction in the Age of #MeToo provide fresh readings of both well-known and lesser-known crime authors. The contemporary authors whose work is examined are Lauren Henderson, Susan White, Jennifer Haigh, Allison Leotta, Y.A. Erskine, Heather Fitt, John Harvey, Dorothy Koomson, Pekka Hiltunen, Nekesa Afia, Michael Nava, Stella Duffy, Alex Reeve, V.T. Davy, and Dharma Kelleher. Through its critical examination of crime fiction, Crime Fiction in the Age of #MeToo offers a powerful feminist analysis of the genre which draws links between literature and ongoing urgent social and cultural debates such as the #Metoo movement and fourth-wave feminism.