Contemporary British Fiction

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Contemporary British Fiction
Edinburgh University Press | 2008-10-15 | ISBN: 0748624198 | Pages: 224 | PDF | 1.06 MB
Nick Bentley provides an introduction to the major novelists and the main themes in narrative fiction over the last 35 years. He offers a critical discussion of important debates in contemporary fiction engaging with concepts such as postmodernism; the impact of feminism and gender in literary studies; the rise of postcolonial literary theory; and the place of fiction within broader debates in contemporary culture. Bentley offers thought-provoking analysis of a range of British writers including Martin Amis, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Ian McEwan, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith and Jeanette Winterson.

The book grounds the discussion of selected novels in the historical and theoretical contexts of the period. It opens with a chronology followed by a comprehensive Introduction that provides a historical context to the study of contemporary British fiction by detailing significant social, political and cultural events of the period 1975-2005. This is followed by five chapters organized around the core themes: (1) Narrative Forms, (2) Contemporary Ethnicities, (3) Gender and Sexuality, (4) History, Memory and Writing, and (5) Narratives of Cultural Space. A Conclusion, Student Resources and Glossary close the book.