London in Contemporary British Fiction

The City Beyond the City

Nick Hubble, Philip Tew, Nick Hubble, Philip Tew

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781350057807
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441191472
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction: Parallax London
• 1. Exploring London in Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005): Trauma and the Traumatological, Identity Politics and Vicarious Victimhood
• 2. Seeing ‘The Empty Space’: Ali Smith’s The Accidental
• 3. Delineating the Liminal in Illimitable London: Will Self ’s The Book of Dave and the Cockney Visionary
• 4. The Changingman: Masculinity, Violence and Revenge in Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog
• 5. Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Sacredness of Space and Time
• 6. Viewing Art in London’s Museums: Ekphrasis in Selected Fiction by Julian Barnes, A. S. Byatt and Peter Ackroyd
• 7. Iain Sinclair: Complexity, Imagination and the Re-Enchanted Margins of London Orbital
• 8. Feeling London Globally: The Location of Affect in White Teeth
• 9. Agency and Conflict in Andrea Levy’s Polyphonic London
• 10. The Liminality of Underground London
• 11. The Un-, Ab- and Alter-Londons of China Miéville: Imaginary Spaces for Concrete Subjects
• 12. Common People: Class, Gender and Social Change in the London Fiction of Virginia Woolf, John Sommerfield and Zadie Smith
• Index