The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction

Nick Bentley, Nick Hubble, Leigh Wilson, Nick Bentley, Nick Hubble, Leigh Wilson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781350005426
• eBook ISBN: 9781441175496
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 2000s shape contemporary British fiction? The means of publishing, buying and reading fiction changed dramatically between 2000 and 2010. This volume explores how the socio-political and economic turns of the decade, bookended by the beginning of a millennium and an economic crisis, transformed the act of writing and reading. Through consideration of, among other things, the treatment of neuroscience, violence, the historical and youth subcultures in recent fiction, the essays in this collection explore the complex and still powerful relation between the novel and the world in which it is written, published and read. This major literary assessment of the fiction of the 2000s covers the work of newer voices such as Monica Ali, Mark Haddon, Tom McCarthy, David Peace and Zadie Smith as well as those more established, such as Salman Rushdie, Hilary Mantel and Ian McEwan making it an essential contribution to reading, defining and understanding the decade.

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Halftitle page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Fiction of the 2000s Political Contexts, Seeing the Contemporary, and the End(s) of Postmodernism
• 1 Literary History of the Decade Fictions from the Borderlands
• 2 Special Topic 1 Subcultural Fictions: Youth Subcultures in Twenty-first-century British Fiction
• 3 Special Topic 2 Translating Neuroscience: Fictions of the Brain in the 2000s
• 4 Postcolonial and Diasporic Voices Contemporary British Fiction in an Age of Transnational Terror
• 5 Historical Representations Reality Effects: The Historical Novel and the Crisis of Fictionality in the First Decade of the Twenty-first Century
• 6 Generic Discontinuities and Variations
• 7 International Contexts 1 The American Reception of British Fiction in the 2000s
• 8 International Contexts 2 From Multicultural Enthusiasm to the ‘Failure of Multiculturalism’: British Multi-ethnic Fiction in an International Frame
• Timeline of Works
• Timeline of National Events
• Timeline of International Events
• Biographies of Writers
• Index