Twenty-First-Century British Fiction and the City

Twenty-First-Century British Fiction and the City
Author: Magali Cornier Michael
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2018-07-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319897284

The essays in this edited collection offer incisive and nuanced analyses of and insights into the state of British cities and urban environments in the twenty-first century. Britain’s experiences with industrialization, colonialism, post-colonialism, global capitalism, and the European Union (EU) have had a marked influence on British ideas about and British literature’s depiction of the city and urban contexts. Recent British fiction focuses in particular on cities as intertwined with globalization and global capitalism (including the proliferation of media) and with issues of immigration and migration. Indeed, decolonization has brought large numbers of people from former colonies to Britain, thus making British cities ever more diverse. Such mixing of peoples in urban areas has led to both racist fears and possibilities of cosmopolitan co-existence.

Twenty-First-Century British Fiction and the City

Twenty-First-Century British Fiction and the City
Author: Magali Cornier Michael
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018-07-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9783319897271

The essays in this edited collection offer incisive and nuanced analyses of and insights into the state of British cities and urban environments in the twenty-first century. Britain’s experiences with industrialization, colonialism, post-colonialism, global capitalism, and the European Union (EU) have had a marked influence on British ideas about and British literature’s depiction of the city and urban contexts. Recent British fiction focuses in particular on cities as intertwined with globalization and global capitalism (including the proliferation of media) and with issues of immigration and migration. Indeed, decolonization has brought large numbers of people from former colonies to Britain, thus making British cities ever more diverse. Such mixing of peoples in urban areas has led to both racist fears and possibilities of cosmopolitan co-existence.

Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century

Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century
Author: Travis Kurowski
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2016-04-12
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1571319220

Gutenberg’s invention of movable type in the fifteenth century introduced an era of mass communication that permanently altered the structure of society. While publishing has been buffeted by persistent upheaval and transformation ever since, the current combination of technological developments, market pressures, and changing reading habits has led to an unprecedented paradigm shift in the world of books. Bringing together a wide range of perspectives—industry veterans and provocateurs, writers, editors, and digital mavericks—this invaluable collection reflects on the current situation of literary publishing, and provides a road map for the shifting geography of its future: How do editors and publishers adapt to this rapidly changing world? How are vibrant public communities in the Digital Age created and engaged? How can an industry traditionally dominated by white men become more diverse and inclusive? Mindful of the stakes of the ongoing transformation, Literary Publishing in the 21st Century goes beyond the usual discussion of 'print vs. digital' to uncover the complex, contradictory, and increasingly vibrant personalities that will define the future of the book.

London in Contemporary British Fiction

London in Contemporary British Fiction
Author: Nick Hubble
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2016-07-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1623560616

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.

Toward the Geopolitical Novel

Toward the Geopolitical Novel
Author: Caren Irr
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2013-12-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231536313

Caren Irr's survey of more than 125 novels outlines the dramatic resurgence of the American political novel in the twenty-first century. She explores the writings of Chris Abani, Susan Choi, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, Dave Eggers, Jeffrey Eugenides, Aleksandar Hemon, Hari Kunzru, Dinaw Mengestu, Norman Rush, Gary Shteyngart, and others as they rethink stories of migration, the Peace Corps, nationalism and neoliberalism, revolution, and the expatriate experience. Taken together, these innovations define a new literary form: the geopolitical novel. More cosmopolitan and socially critical than domestic realism, the geopolitical novel provides new ways of understanding crucial political concepts to meet the needs of a new century.

Critical Perspectives on Resistance in 21st-Century British Literature

Critical Perspectives on Resistance in 21st-Century British Literature
Author: Nilay Erdem Ayyıldız
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2024-04-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1036402983

This book sets out on an intellectual journey, with each chapter acting as a unique compass to lead the reader through the critical perspectives on resistance waiting to be discovered in 21st-century British literature. As such, the book appeals to general readers, including undergraduates, researchers, professionals, and anyone who is interested in cultural studies, literary studies, the humanities, and sociology, particularly resistance and discourse studies.

The Working Class and Twenty-First-Century British Fiction

The Working Class and Twenty-First-Century British Fiction
Author: Phil O'Brien
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2019-12-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000763285

The Working Class and Twenty-First-Century British Fiction looks at how the twenty-first-century British novel has explored contemporary working-class life. Studying the works of David Peace, Gordon Burn, Anthony Cartwright, Ross Raisin, Jenni Fagan, and Sunjeev Sahota, the book shows how they have mapped the shift from deindustrialisation through to stigmatization of individuals and communities who have experienced profound levels of destabilization and unemployment. O'Brien argues that these novels offer ways of understanding fundamental aspects of contemporary capitalism for the working class in modern Britain, including, class struggle, inequality, trauma, social abjection, racism, and stigmatization, exclusively looking at British working-class literature of the twenty-first century.

21st-Century British Gothic

21st-Century British Gothic
Author: Emily Horton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2024-01-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350286575

In this innovative re-casting of the genre and its received canon, Emily Horton explores fictional investments in the Gothic within contemporary British literature, revealing how such concepts as the monstrous, spectral and uncanny work to illuminate the insecure, uneven and precarious experience of 21st-century life. Reading contemporary works of Gothic fiction by Helen Oyeyemi, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sarah Moss, Patrick McGrath and M.R. Carey alongside writers not previously grouped under this umbrella, including Brian Chikwava, Chloe Aridjis and Mohsin Hamid, Horton illuminates the way the Gothic has been engaged and reread by contemporary writers to address the cultural anxieties invoked living under neocolonial and neoliberal governance, including terrorism, migration, homelessness, racism, and climate change. Marshalling new modes of diasporic and cross-disciplinary critical theory concerned with the violent dimensions of contemporary life, this book sets the Gothic aesthetics in such works as White is for Witching, Double Vision, Never Let Me Go, The Wasted Vigil and Ghost Wall against a backdrop of key events in the 21st-century. Drawing connections between moments of anxiety, such as 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, ecological disaster, the refugee crisis, Brexit, the pandemic, and the Gothic, Horton demonstrates how British literature mediates transnational experiences of trauma and horror, while also addressing local and national insecurities and preoccupations. As a result, 21st-Century British Gothic can tests geographical, psychological, cultural, and aesthetic borders to expose an often spectralised experience of human and planetary vulnerability and speaks back against the brutality of global capitalism.

Locating Classed Subjectivities

Locating Classed Subjectivities
Author: Simon Lee
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2022-05-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000582795

Locating Classed Subjectivities explores representations of social class in British fiction through the lens of spatial theory and analysis. By analyzing a range of class-conscious texts from the nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first centuries, the collection provides an overview of the way British writers mobilized spatial aesthetics as a means to comment on the intricacies of social class. In doing so, the collection delineates aesthetic strategies of representation in British writing, tracing the development of literary forms while considering how authors mobilized innovative spatial metaphors to better express contingent social and economic realities. Ranging in coverage from early-nineteenth-century narratives of disease to contemporary writing on the working-class millennial, Locating Classed Subjectivities offers new perspectives on literary techniques and political intentions, exploring the way class is parsed and critiqued through British writing across three centuries. As such, the project responds to Nigel Thrift and Peter Williams’s claim that literary and cultural production serves as a particularly rich yet unexamined access point by which to comprehend the way space and social class intersect.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Author: Thomas Piketty
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 817
Release: 2017-08-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0674979850

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In this work the author analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. He shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values if political action is not taken. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, the author says, and may do so again. This original work reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.