Contemporary British Literature

Let's Dance: The Line of Beauty and the Revenant Figure of Thatcher

by Kim Duff

“Spells Out The Word of Itself, and Then Dispelling Itself”: The Chaotics of Memory and The Ghost of the Novel in Jeff Noon’s Falling out of Cars

by Andrew Wenaus

Forthcoming: Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

This article is a study of British author Jeff Noon’s most recent novel Falling out of Cars (2002) as a literary... more This article is a study of British author Jeff Noon’s most recent novel Falling out of Cars (2002) as a literary experiment engaged in raising the ghost of the modern novel, long hailed as dead.  Here, Noon samples canonic literature then transforms, manipulates, and reconfigures it in much the same way a message is transformed when being passed through a communication circuit. The result is a kind of poetic prose Noon terms “metamorphiction”: an elegant experimental mode of fantasy in which signs mutate within certain systemic parameters.  In metamorphiction, the textual past literally haunts the textual present.  This formal experiment is mirrored in the content: the novel concerns a middle aged woman mourning the death of her daughter.  Ultimately, Falling out of Cars is both a virtuosic piece of fantastic fiction and a serious meditation on the contemporary state of the novel.     

21st Century British Fiction Symposium - Call For Papers

by Tony Venezia

21st Century British Fiction Symposium - 12th May 2012, Birkbeck, University of London.  CFP deadline 15th March 2012.

21st Century British Fiction Symposium - 12th May 2012, Birkbeck, University of London.  Keynote speaker:... more 21st Century British Fiction Symposium - 12th May 2012, Birkbeck, University of London.  Keynote speaker: Professor Robert Eaglestone (Royal Holloway). 

Twenty-First Century British Fiction seeks to consider and promote current perspectives on the fiction of British writers in the twenty-first century.  Post-millennial writing has proved itself as arguably wide-ranging and innovative as its predecessors.  With Granta's next decennial list due in 2013, it seems only fitting and appropriate to survey the twenty-first century’s first decade of British Fiction. 

We invite submissions for 20 minute presentations; papers on individual authors and single works are welcome, as are essays on broader trends that explore the cultural, historical and stylistic contexts that have produced twenty-first century British fiction. 

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words, with brief details of biography and affiliation, to Bianca Leggett and Tony Venezia at 21stcentury.symposium@gmail.com no later than 15th March 2012.  We also welcome proposals for themed panels of three speakers.  We are currently in negotiations with an academic publisher interested in publishing a volume based on the proceedings of the symposium. The symposium is sponsored by the School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London.


http://www.bbk.ac.uk/arts/news/twenty-first-century-british-fiction-a-symposium
http://c21stsymposium.wordpress.com/
On twitter @C21st_symposium

Men Negotiating Identity in Zadie Smith's White Teeth

by Taryn Beukema

"You are cordially invited to a / CHEMICAL WEDDING": Metamorphiction and Experimentation in Jeff Noon's Cobralingus

by Andrew Wenaus

Electronic Book Review
January 2012

This paper is a study of British author Jeff Noon’s writing game, the Cobralingus Engine, from his experimental novel,... more This paper is a study of British author Jeff Noon’s writing game, the Cobralingus Engine, from his experimental novel, Cobralingus (2001).  The aesthetic process of this game whimsically engages with information theory and the remix techniques of electronic music.  In the game, a sample of canonic literature is imaginatively sent through a communication circuit, transformed, manipulated, and finally reconfigured.  The result is a kind poetic prose Noon terms metamorphiction: an amusing and elegant experimental mode in which signs metamorphose and mutate within certain systemic parameters; in short, it is a narrative, not of deconstruction, but of reconstruction. 

Fractal Narrative, Paraspace, and Strange Loops: The Paradox of Escape in Jeff Noon's Vurt.

by Andrew Wenaus

Science Fiction Studies #113 = Volume 38

This article examines how Jeff Noon grafts concepts from chaos theory to literature in order to develop a playful... more This article examines how Jeff Noon grafts concepts from chaos theory to literature in order to develop a playful narrative form appropriate to representing multiple ontological levels. I argue this by looking closely at the roles of form, metaphor, and content in Noon’s stylish debut novel, Vurt (1993). The novel’s movement from order to disorder and finally towards a new order suggests that the structure of Vurt may operate mimetically according to the vision of reality proposed by chaos theorists. In this way, Noon experiments with literary form by reinterpreting the narrative spaces of virtual reality through the metaphors of fractal geometry, a spatial phenomenon that so delighted the popular imagination at the time of the novel’s publication. I explore the relationship between metaphor and content through the trope of conflict between order/chaos and meaning/hopelessness, and by applying Douglas Hofstadter’s theory of consciousness and his concept of the paradoxical “strange loop.” These tropes may cast light on the complexities of the characters’ intense desires for transcendence and how the form of the novel itself makes this ambivalent quest difficult, if not impossible. Accordingly, chaos functions not only as a reminder of the turbulence inherent in human experience but also of the exciting aesthetic possibilities this theory extends to literature.

Rhizomatic Horror: Eclipsed Narrative and Experimental Weird Fiction in Steve Beard’s Digital Leatherette

by Andrew Wenaus

Extrapolation 53.1

Bruce Sterling recently criticized the fiction of Steve Beard as “being based in quote, Theory, unquote” and that this... more Bruce Sterling recently criticized the fiction of Steve Beard as “being based in quote, Theory, unquote” and that this academicism is ineffective for slipstream fiction. This article suggests that Beard’s novel, Digital Leatherette (1999), is not slipstream fiction but rather an intervention in New Weird fiction. Beard employs the conceptual structure, the rhizome, formulated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as the diegetic framework for his novel. The result is an assemblage of fictions that refer to a constitutive narrative; yet, this unified diegesis remains eclipsed and unnamable. Digital Leatherette confronts H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror in an age where the “inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents” is more of a formal axiom than aphorism.

‘No Redemption': The Death of the City in the work of David Peace

by Jarrad Keyes

Published in Analysing David Peace, edited by Katy Shaw (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), pp. 19-40

This essay examines how the image of the city is a key metaphor for Peace's critique of Thatcherism and neoliberalism... more This essay examines how the image of the city is a key metaphor for Peace's critique of Thatcherism and neoliberalism in his Red Riding Quartet (1999-2002) and GB84 (2004)

Occasional Paper: Language, Ideology and the 'Scottish Voice'

by James Costa

Costa, J. (2011). Language, ideologies, and the ‘Scottish voice’. International Journal of Scottish Literature, 7.

In this Occasional Paper, I would like to emphasise one way in which language ideological issues permeate literary... more In this Occasional Paper, I would like to emphasise one way in which language ideological issues permeate literary discourse in Scotland. Focusing on issues related to Scots, I will analyse two (in my view complementary) introductions to anthologies of texts in Scots published over the past twenty years, and show how they participate in a wider ideological debate on language and society in Scotland.

Naipaul’s English Fable: Mr Stone and the Knights Companion

by John Thieme

Modern Fiction Studies, 30, 3 (1984): 497-503.

The chapter on Mr Stone and the Knights Companion in my book The Web of Tradition: Uses of Allusion in V.S. Naipaul’s Fiction, London: Hansib and Aarhus: Dangaroo Press, 1987 covers similar material. 

Pauline Melville

by John Thieme

Published in Modern British Women Writers: An A-Z Guide, ed. Vicki K. Janik and Del Ivan Janik, Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 2002: 230-35.

Throwing One’s Voice? Narrative Agency in Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s Tale

by John Thieme

Published in The Literary Criterion, 35, 1-2 (2000): 170-92;

and also in The Vitality of West Indian Literature: Caribbean and Indian Essays, ed. H. Cynthia Wyatt, Mysore: Dhvanyaloka, 2000: 170-92.

An adapted version of this also appears in my book Postcolonial Con-Texts, London and New York: Co tinuum, 2001.

Angela Carter's Excessive Stagings of the Canon: Psychoanalytic Closets, Hermaphroditic Dreams, and Jacobean Westerns

by Susanne Gruss

(forthc. 2012) Angela Carter: New Critical Readings. Eds. Sonya Andermahr and Lawrence Phillips. London, Continuum.

Angela Carter has often been depicted as a subversive critic of stereotypical notions of gender, but she was also an... more Angela Carter has often been depicted as a subversive critic of stereotypical notions of gender, but she was also an untiring demythologiser of the (male) Western canon and its historical and theoretical contexts. Focusing on "The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe", "Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream", and "John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore", I will discuss how Carter both stages and appropriates 'the canon' in these texts. "The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe" is a recreation of Poe's childhood (and an excavation of his mother) in explicitly Oedipal terms; with a text drenched in psychoanalytic catchphrases, Carter not merely questions Poe, but also deconstructs the psychoanalytic discourse that has predominated readings of Poe's work for some time. "Overture and Incidental Music" gives a voice to 'Golden Herm', a marginalized figure in Shakespeare's original text (as post-colonial critics have repeatedly emphasised). At the same time, Carter also humorously writes against the way in which Shakespeare was canonised and bowdlerized by the Victorians by making Herm and the fairies playfully transgressive in their sexuality. Finally, "John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore" grafts the plot of the Jacobean play onto a fictitious screenplay for a film by the American director John Ford and thus transfers the revenge tragedy to what is arguably its 20th-century equivalent – the Western. As I will show in my paper, it is through these excessive and humorous (re)stagings of canonised authors, texts, and contexts that Carter explores and explodes the canon.

Delineating the Urban: The Global City and the Logics of Dissolution

by Jarrad Keyes

'Archaeologies of the Future': Niall Griffiths - Pathways of the Urban

by Jarrad Keyes

Chapter IX in The Idea of the City: Early-Modern, Modern and Post-Modern Locations and Communities, edited by Joan Fitzpatrick (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp. 133-144

In this chapter I use Niall Griffiths's 2005 novel Wreckage to illustrate what Henri Lefebvre calls the 'urban... more In this chapter I use Niall Griffiths's 2005 novel Wreckage to illustrate what Henri Lefebvre calls the 'urban revolution', and examine its consequences on conceptualizations of space in literary criticism

The Poetics of Mystery: Genre, Representation, and Narrative Ethics in John Fowles's Historical Fiction

by Klaus Brax

(Feeling) As it Actually Happened: History as Sensation in A.S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance

by Kate Mitchell

Published in Uhlmann, Anthony, Helen Groth, Paul Sheehan, and Stephen McLaren, Literature and Sensation. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2009). 266-279.

Form and Meaning In the Novels of John Fowles

by Susana Onega

Cultural Hybridity and Subject's Identity in Contemporary Postcolonial Theory and Literature: Rushdie, Suleri, Smith

by Antonija Primorac

MA Thesis defended in September 2004.

Jezik, identitet i multikulturalnost u romanu Bijeli zubi Zadie Smith/Language, identity and multiculturalism in Zadie Smith's White Teethin Three Contemporary Postcolonial Novels

by Antonija Primorac

Published in: Language and Identity: 20th international conference : conference proceedings. Edited by Jagoda Granić. Zagreb ; Split : Hrvatsko društvo za primijenjenu lingvistiku, 2007. 497-504.

The paper explores the ways language is used to portray different identities in Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth. The... more The paper explores the ways language is used to portray different identities in Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth. The focus of the paper is on the depiction of various possible relationships between individual and group identities within a multicultural society as expressed by language use of the characters in the novel, especially the first and second generation immigrants in modern Britain. NB. The article is in Croatian.