Contemporary British Fiction

The fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro has gained popularity and critical eminence since the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017. This coincided with arguments about the status of the global novel as a product of a new world literature. This essay considers the two different critical approaches to this debate: allegorical readings of fiction as historical forms, and phenomenological approaches based in affect theory and network theory. The main part of the essay surveys the word“triumph”in five novels by Kazuo Ishiguro. By so doing, it hopes to demonstrate that the word forms a specific trope or motif across the author’s work that helps readers to better understand the specific way his fiction relates to the global novel debate. The phrase
“a sense of triumph”is part of a significant passage in The Remains of the Day, where it suggests the protagonists mistaken sense of self-importance in contributing to global politics through his job as a servant. This is compared with similar passages in the novels The Artist of the Floating W orld and When W e W ere Orphans, which both reflect on the politic of Japan and China in 1930s. The essay suggests ways in which style and content of Ishiguro’s fictions can be understood in terms of affect theory and allegory.

This paper focuses on the ambiguous status of the half-chapter in Julian Barnes’ novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989). “Parenthesis” stands in contradistinction to the other ten chapters in that it offers a concerted riposte to the provisionality of postmodern history by installing love as a structuring logic by which the terrifying randomness of the past can be negotiated. Much of the distinctiveness of “Parenthesis” derives from the intrusion of an authorial-narratorial figuration of Julian Barnes which, it is argued, lends the half-chapter a degree of authorial privilege and narrative stability that is not evident elsewhere. By reading the ‘honesty’ of Barnes’ discourse on love as a postmodern strategy of seduction, it is claimed that the redemptive potential of love as a way of making meaning from chaos is compromised. To recognise this is to face the prospect that Barnes lulls his reader into believing that “Parenthesis” offers an escape from the scepticism of postmodernism only to confront them with their own naïve desire for order in narrative as in history.

Howard Jacobson is a contemporary British Jewish writer whose autobiographically inspired novels feature protagonists who are men of Jewish background with an extensive knowledge of English literature like the author, who read English at Cambridge. The narrator of Jacobson’s second novel Peeping Tom (1984) is Barney Fugleman, a literary critic whose urban Jewish heritage alienates him from the pastoral tradition embraced by much of canonical English literature. Yet, to his shock, when Fugleman undergoes hypnosis, he is revealed to be a reincarnation of Thomas Hardy, a writer he once dismissively called “prurient little Victorian ratbag.” However, as the novel discloses some similarities between Fugleman’s and Hardy’s lives, it may be read as a reflection on English Jewish sense of belonging. While the text initially portrays Jewishness and Englishness as binary opposites, it gradually highlights that both of them are inseparable aspects of Fugleman’s bifurcated identity.

“Fielding is straightforward in connecting her novels to Austen’s:  ‘I shamelessly stole the plot from Pride and Prejudice for the first book.  I thought it had been very well market-researched over a number of centuries and she probably wouldn’t mind’” (Cecilia Salber, “Bridget Jones and Mark Darcy: Art Imitating Art”, Persuasion On-Line, 2001).

If one read Bridget Jones’s Diary before or after they had read Pride and Prejudice, the allusions or appropriations applied by Helen Fielding seem to be quite evident: the name and character of Mark Darcy is quite the equal of Fitzwilliam Darcy, in Bridget’s behaviour one can easily detect the characteristics of Elizabeth Bennet, their love stories resonate as well. Moreover, Bridget’s mother is as unbearable as Mrs. Bennet and Daniel Clever is the same handsome-but-dangerous womanizer as Mr. Wickham for whom one can easily fall.
Therefore, in this paper, I am aiming to discover to what extent Helen Fielding’s famous novel, Bridget Jones’s Diary is the modern heir to Jane Austen’s novels. After a brief introduction, I would like to explore the level of relatedness among Pride and Prejudice and Fielding’s fictional diary, Bridget Jones’s Diary regarding their genres, literary-historical contexts and narrative techniques.
In the meantime, I wish to contradict the – mainly feminist – critics, for example Alison A. Case (Plotting Women: Gender and Narration in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel, 1999) and Rosalind Gill (“Rewriting the romance: new femininities in chick lit?”, Feminist Media Studies, 2006), who accused Bridget Jones’s Diary of being anti-feminist in our era of post-feminism, explaining that Bridget’s character is unrealistic and she lacks narrative or behavioural control. That being so – they say – Fielding’s novel is not worthy of her ancestor’s name, nor deserves to be treated as traditional “women’s literature”. It just simply belongs to the category of “chick lit”, of popular woman’s fiction. Consequently, in this essay, I am trying to show the similarities between Austen’s and Fielding’s work, to underline the literary importance of Bridget Jones and finally to emphasize its feminism.

La presente mesa redonda se plantea explorar los procesos de recreación del Renacimiento que se han desarrollado en la cultura de finales de siglo XX en ficciones cinematográficas y literarias, considerados dentro del contexto del paradigma posmoderno de los estudios renacentistas. La discusión se centrará en la exploración de tres áreas específicas y complementarias de la representación en la narrativa y el cine de la época isabelina llevada a cabo en los últimos años. Las áreas que se analizan son: 1) el uso de la figura del propio dramaturgo como personaje en cine y literatura, que articula una renovada fascinación por el concepto de autoría; 2) la representación de la monarquía renacentista como estructura de poder en los retratos cinematográficos de la reina Isabel I, que expresa preocupaciones e inquietudes contemporáneas sobre dicha institución y su papel en la sociedad británica actual y 3) la reconstrucción del mundo del teatro en películas recientes, en un momento en el que el acercamiento académico al Renacimiento presta gran atención a los aspectos de escenificación del teatro de la época.

Nick Bentley provides a comprehensive survey of the most important debates in the criticism and research of contemporary British fiction. Vibrant and approachable, this authoritative guide:

* analyses the criticism surrounding a range of British novelists including Monica Ali, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Alan Hollinghurst, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Sarah Waters and Jeanette Winterson
* explores experiments with literary form
* examines current issues in the cultural politics of class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality
* considers cutting-edge concerns relating to the neo-historical novel, the relationship between literature and science, literary geographies, and trauma narratives.

Engaging with key literary theories, and identifying present trends and future directions in the literary criticism of contemporary British fiction, this is an invaluable resource for students, teachers, researchers and scholars alike.

Martin Amis is one of the most important and distinctive writers of the last forty years and his work continues to provoke controversy and debate. From his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973), to his most recent his fiction has engaged with the major movements in literary and critical theory over the last four decades. His experimental approach to the novel form, his creation of complex and memorable characters, and his acute awareness of the relationship between fiction and reality mark out the distinctive elements of Amis s work. In addition, his often-controversial representations of class, gender and race make him an important and provocative figure for contemporary literary studies. This book provides a critical survey and evaluation of his major works, identifying his commitment to stylistic expression and experiment alongside the ways in which his novels have engaged with social, cultural and political issues.

The aim of this article is to examine the comic vision and comedic elements in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim. As a postwar realistic novel, Lucky Jim implements various techniques of comedy to ridicule and satirise personal and social flaws, focusing on the critique of the phoniness of the academic world. Amis employs parody, farce, irony and satire to deride affectation, rigidity and social flaws. The novel depicts the absurdity of the condition of the anti-hero in an alien society through the use of comedy, showing the incongruous coexistence of the serious and the comic, the lofty and the vulgar in a grotesque, carnivalesque manner. It can be argued that humour functions as a weapon to cope with antagonistic forces in postwar existence and helps the individual to overcome repressions and preserve self-respect in the face of a ridiculous and duplicitous reality. Laughter is remedial in the novel, which subverts the monolithic, and aims to satirise and correct social imperfections. This article will explore Lucky Jim by investigating and applying theories of comedy and humour, focusing mainly on the ideas of Bergson, Freud and Bakhtin. Öz Bu makalenin amacı Kingsley Amis'in Lucky Jim adlı romanında mizah anlayışı ve komedi unsurlarını incelemektir. İkinci Dünya Savaşı sonrası romanı olarak Lucky Jim, bireysel ve toplumsal kusurları özellikle akademik dünyanın sahteliğinin eleştirisi odağında yermek ve alaya almak için birçok komedi tekniği kullanır. Amis, yapmacıklık, katılık ve toplumsal kusurları alaya almak için parodi, fars, ironi ve hicivden yararlanır. Roman anti-kahramanın yabancılaştığı toplumdaki absürd durumunu komedi aracılığıyla, ciddiyle komiğin, asil ile vasatın uyumsuz beraberliğini grotesk, karnavalsı bir biçimde göstererek ortaya koyar. Mizahın romanda, savaş sonrası varoluş içinde yer alan karşıt güçlerle başa çıkmak için kullanılan bir silah işlevi gördüğü ve bireyin baskıları ortadan kaldırmaya ve anlamsız ve aldatıcı gerçeklik karşısında kendine olan saygısını korumasına yardımcı olduğu düşüncesi ileri sürülebilir. "Gülmece" kavramı romanda, tekdüze olanı yıkması ve toplumsal sorunları yermesi ve düzeltmesi bakımından iyileştirici bir özelliğe sahiptir. Çalışma, Lucky Jim romanını komedi ve mizah teorilerini inceleyip uygulayarak ve özellikle Bergson, Freud ve Bakhtin gibi düşünürlerin görüşlerine odaklanarak irdeleyecektir.

The aim of this study is to analyze Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion and Sexing the Cherry in terms of the feminine symbolic the writer creates in her female characters’ narratives through a process of literalizing dead metaphors. Using metaphors in their literal sense, a rhetorical pattern which Regina Barreca calls “metaphor-into-narrative,” is often deemed a subversive tool in women writers’ works to create “laughter”. It shows that women writers often use a metaphor in a conflicting context in their comedic works, and thereby stripping language of its symbolic quality. The present study argues that the marginal subject position of Winterson’s female characters as “misfits” creates a noticeable difference in their discourses and suggests a move from the symbolic order of language to a feminine symbolic. With the examples from The Passion and Sexing the Cherry, the article studies Winterson’s “literalization” to reveal how the writer uses metaphors out of their original contexts not only to create humor but also to destabilize the singular order of language used in historiographic representation by leaving the distinction between what is figurative and what is literal unclear. Winterson’s female characters in The Passion and in Sexing the Cherry are also fitting examples for Bakhtin’s “Fool” with their resistance to join in the discourse of patriarchy and to understand the habitual ways of conceiving the world.

During the twentieth century, women poets who were immensely influenced by the most revolutionary aspects of modernism, gave rise to what French feminists called 'écriture feminine' as a desired way of writing differently. In feminist writings emphasis seems to be more on how women are oppressed in the society as well as their anxieties about their bodies. Margaret Atwood (b. 1939) the Canadian nationalist poetess is a prominent figure concerned with the need for a new language to explore relations between subjects and society, the power relations that define one's identity as well as the inadequacy of phallocentric discourse. What is also noteworthy in Atwood's writings is the rewriting of images and myths born by the patriarchal society and Western civilization. This study is an attempt to shed light on the ways Atwood pursues French feminists with emphasis on female body and language to show the poetess's exploration of female identity in her less-referred-to poem "This is a Photograph of Me." The writers have tried to show Atwood's tackling identity and restriction through the act of rewriting such established images as light and water.

""UEA Thesis (2011)

In this thesis I draw upon recent formulations of fantasy theory, from Rosemary Jackson’s psychoanalytic analysis to the socio-historical approaches of José Monleon and Mark Bould, and the poetics of fantasy literature of Farah Mendlesohn, to illuminate the interlocking political debates about fantasy fiction which are important to literary theory: whether fantasy is a minor sub-set of literature or the basis of all fiction; whether fantasy functions primarily as a satirical or utopian idiom, or as sheer escapism; and whether fantasy is a liberating expression of the imagination or a limiting and commodified form. ""

The full thesis can be downloaded via the UEA Digital Repository: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/19302.

I want to begin this essay by pointing out what I think has become a salient feature, or at least significant trend, in contemporary British and American literary fiction: namely, a prominent reappearance of the ostensibly redundant omniscient narrator. We are accustomed to an historical trajectory of the novel which holds that modernist and postmodernist fiction throughout the twentieth century can be characterised, in part, as a rejection of the moral and epistemological certainties of omniscient narration. I want to suggest that the contemporary revival of omniscience in fact represents a further development and refinement of some of the technical experiments of postmodern fiction. I want to further argue that the reworking of omniscience in contemporary fiction can be understood as one way in which authors have responded to a perceived decline in the cultural authority of the novel over the last two decades.

Attending to the features of contemporary omniscience will also help us to productively reconsider the formal category of omniscient narration itself.

In this paper, I analyse time as a central topic as well as a peculiar structural element in Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. Relying on the heideggerian notion of humans as beings in time, I analyse the recurring time-related images of the river, blood, and the pulse in the novel, along with the central character’s meditations on the nature of time. I discuss the unreliability of memory and the importance of corroboration with respect to the protagonist Tony Webster’s narrative identity. Focusing on the pervading unease due to the inaccessibility of the past, I examine the problems of remorse and guilt, and show that despite the irreversible linearity of time, repetitions in the narrative result in a circular structure that echoes the process of remembering. Finally, expanding on Tony Webster’s definition of subjective and objective time, I base my analysis on a combination of Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time and his concept of duration and Gérard Genette’s concepts of time in narratives. My aim is to illustrate Frank Kermode’s claims concerning the lack of proper, comforting endings in current Western culture, as well as the resulting unease and need for narrative order, while defining humanity’s attitude towards the past, the nature and the passing of time in the postmodern era.

“Aberrant experiments”: reading society in the novel experiments of Britain and France 1945-1975 contests the reduced position of the experimental novel in the post-war socio-cultural sphere. My thesis situates the experimental novel of the period in Britain and France in a space of critical connectivity that both challenges a number of prevailing critical orthodoxies, and potentially offers new avenues of critical attention within the subject. I also argue that the blind, or appropriative, eye turned to these texts has acted to disjoint them from their potential social reflections, and here try to reposition them within their native atmosphere; thus refind this ground. To such an end, I, with some exceptions, return the experimental novel to its original tenets as set out in 1880 by Émile Zola in Le Roman expérimental as a ‘white cell’ within the ‘social circulus’ that harbours the potential to ‘cure’ society of its ‘delusions’, and develop this schema further. As such, this thesis mimics the processes of experimental medicine; in which its three partitions deal each with a different stage of the experimental treatment of a social illness. In such, the first partition approaches the perception of sickness; where I observe depictions of social relation and cultural presence in the experimental novel, and the symptoms of illness there-in described as issues of history, dominant culture; and indeed the field of critique itself. Following this, the second partition brings the study into the phase of diagnosis of sickness; where the illness itself is diagnosed through a content study of the experimental novel. This then follows to the third and final partition, which attempts to view the experimental techniques employed in order to ‘break down’ these delusions; in essence attempt to indeed ‘cure society’ of the sickness described in the preceding partitions.

Keywords: post-war experimental literature, Britain, France, reading socii in the experimental novel, reflections of contemporary, re-forming Britain post-war

Kazuo Ishiguro (1954), the Nobel Laureate author, setting his novel The Buried Giant in Arthurian Britain, thoroughly analyzed prominent points of memory, trauma, forgetfulness, and chivalric code by way of narrating the interesting detours of Axl and Beatrice in a story of loss, death, regret, and love. In a strange forgetfulness, which causes villagers to forget their distant and recent past, the buried story about Arthurian chivalry manifests itself on every page by raising questions on the concepts of loyalty, honour, and courage. Ishiguro tells the story of the old couple, Axl and Beatrice, who perseveringly want to find their son, crumbs of information about who would bring out the painful consequences of having an illegitimate baby. He also rewrites the Arthurian legend from a contemporary perspective by making use of elements related to the concepts of memory and trauma. The aim of this study is to analyze the concepts of loss, death, memory, trauma, remembering, and forgetting under the basic points of postmodern narrative strategies such as historiographic metafiction to show the determinant factors on the historicization of King Arthur in an evolutionary story of Kazuo Ishiguro in a 21 stcentury perspective.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Born in 1976 in Bermuda, Jon McGregor grew up in Norfolk, England, and currently lives in Nottingham. McGregor came to literary prominence with the publication of his first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (Bloomsbury, 2002). The novel was an immediate success, and at just twenty-six years old, McGregor was the youngest contender—and only first-time novelist—for the Man Booker Prize long list that year. Short-listed for the British Book Awards Newcomer of the Year, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, If Nobody Speaks went on to win the Betty Trask Award and the Somerset Maugham Award in 2003. This critical success enabled McGregor to write full-time, move out of his narrow boat, and give up his various part-time jobs, which had ranged from working in a call center, a T-shirt factory, and a post office to standing in a bear costume to advertise the new pound shop in Barnsley high street.

McGregor conceived the novel while studying media technology and production at the University of Bradford, where he became absorbed by the anonymity of urban life and its complete contrast with his rural childhood. As he has written on his Web site:

For a long time, I had felt alienated by this urban landscape; I had grown up in a small market town in East Anglia, and I missed the open spaces, the flat land, the ability to wander from my front door to the woods and the streams of the countryside close at hand. I resented the noise and the enforced hurry of urban life, the litter, the disregard, the fear of violence. But that night, standing on the roof of my house and hearing the symphony of the city by night, I fell in love. I decided to write a novel about this love, and I decided that it would begin here, in the brief moment of quiet before the dawn.

This moment provided the opening to If Nobody Speaks—the pause in the city's all-night "constant crush of sound," as roadmenders, factory machines, delivery lorries, fighting cats, night fishermen, and drunk teenagers observe "the briefest of silences" (1, 3). McGregor's lyrical attentiveness to the moments of unremarked beauty in the minute workings of inner-city daily life frames a novel of great warmth and sensitivity, exploring the connections that puncture the otherwise anonymous urban routines of what he has called, in an interview with Neil Cocker, "the archetypal inner-city terraced street."

McGregor's second novel, So Many Ways to Begin (Bloomsbury, 2006), explores a similarly balanced investigation into the joy experienced in the most mundane and everyday occurrences as well as the emotional impact of long-term depression. Shortlisted for the Encore Award, So Many Ways traces the steady erosion of the youthful ambitions of its married protagonists David and Eleanor Carter (parents of the unnamed female narrator in If Nobody Speaks), with the narrative structured around a collection of personally archived objects from both characters' pasts. The novel's portrait of a marriage is set in Coventry—a city that McGregor has said he chose because the twentieth-century history of Coventry is a microcosm of the history of England (Cocker interview)—and traces David's search for his own identity after he accidentally learns of his secret adoption shortly after World War II. David's biological mother was, he discovers, an Irish migrant worker, and the novel's themes of exile, migration, alternative possible histories, and personal and national identity are echoed in David's work as a museum curator, organizing an exhibition entitled Refugees, Migrants, New Arrivals. Although it was less celebrated than If Nobody Speaks, McGregor's second novel was well-received by critics and has to date been translated into Turkish, Romanian, French, Finnish, Italian, Dutch, German, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, and Hebrew.

January 2010 saw the publication of McGregor's third novel, Even the Dogs (Bloomsbury), which offers a compassionate and unflinching interrogation of a community of homeless characters, from the novel's central, dead character, Robert, to heroin addicts, runaway teenagers, and army veterans who have served in Afghanistan...

Whilst there has been much work done on the way in which subcultures have been represented in the media, through semiotic display, and in other cultural forms such as musical expression, fashion, artwork and fanzines, there has been very little work done on the way in which subcultures have been articulated in narrative fiction. This is somewhat surprising given the fact that the subcultural novel has been an attendant form of expression mapping the rise of classic subcultures in the latter half of the twentieth century. From the 1950s, for example, we might identify Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners, Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar, which to varying degrees offer fictional examinations of identifiable youth subcultures such as the Teddy Boys, jazz fans and the emergent Mod scene. Richard Allen’s series of pulp novels in the 1970s looked at skinhead, suedehead and punk culture (1970; 1971; 1972), whilst several novels associated with more serious literary fiction such as Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia, and Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club have all included characters who are immersed in varying kinds of youth subcultures. Many other writers have addressed subcultural identity through fiction over the last sixty years or so such as Martin Amis (1973), Iain Banks (1987), Nicholas Blincoe (1995), Nik Cohn (1967), Toby Litt (1997), Bill Naughton (1966), Zadie Smith (2000; 2005), Alan Warner (1995), and Irvine Welsh (1993; 2012).  However, the analysis of subcultural fiction seems to have fallen between academic disciplines. Cultural studies and sociological approaches have, perhaps naturally, tended to focus on media representation, semiotic display, ethnography and the related interpretation of the cultural and ideological meaning of subcultures.  Literary studies, on the other hand, has not really identified subcultural literature as a distinct form of literary analysis, although there has been much work done on other forms of popular genre-fiction such as the detective novel, romance and the gothic novel (Ashley 1989; Bennett 1990; McCracken 1998; Phillips 2006; Radway 1984; Spooner, 2006).

What is also noticeable, however, when researching this body of fiction is the increase of novels that have incorporated elements of subcultures over the last fifteen years or so. This period, of course, represents the relative decline in ‘classic’ subcultural analysis as produced by the Birmingham and Chicago Schools; and one of the arguments I want to put forward in this chapter is that fiction has perhaps filled a gap left by this relative drawing back (or critical reassessment) of subcultural studies as it moved into the twenty-first century. This chapter identifies a rise in subcultural fiction in Britain in the 2000s, citing a range of novels that explore the social and political importance of contemporary and historical youth subcultures in British society by writers such as Monica Ali (2003), Niall Griffiths (2000), Stewart Home (2005), John King (2000; 2008), Courttia Newland (1999), Gautam Malkani (2006), Zadie Smith (2000; 2005), and Alex Wheatle (1999; 2001; 2008). From this list, I will discuss two novels in detail: Gautam Malkani’s 2006 work Londonstani, and John King’s Skinheads, published two years later.

Howard Jacobson is a British Jewish writer, journalist and former professor of English literature who has authored sixteen novels, starting with his 1983 comic campus novel Coming from Behind, as well as six works of non-fiction. In all his works, Jacobson communicates insights into a variety of cultural as well as social topics, often motivated by his own experience. While Jacobson received more credit as a writer after being awarded the Booker Prize for his eleventh novel The Finkler Question in 2010, this recognition does not seem to have initiated a significant interest in his early writing. This paper thus aims to re-evaluate Jacobson's first novel by contextualizing it within the author's oeuvre as well as in the tradition of the British campus novel. Devoting close attention to the portrayal of British Jewish identity, intertextuality, and the use of comic and satirical elements, this article seeks to answer the question to what degree Jacobson's debut novel laid foundations for his later fiction.

This essay examines the discursive interpenetration of trauma and celebrity culture, and, through an examination of the multiple killer in recent British writing and culture, locates the interest in both in the alienating otherness of the Real. Reading the work of Gordon Burn, David Peace and Rupert Thomson, the essay explores the semiotic crossover between the celebrity and the murderer as contemporary icons and situates both as symptoms of a pathological rewriting of subjectivity. The dynamics of trauma as a means of asserting a wounded and therefore meaningful self are addressed, and the narrative potential of repetition is highlighted. Underpinning the discussion is the figure of Myra Hindley whose image has proven a potent resource for artists and writers seeking to explore the uncomfortable attraction-in-repulsion of the ‘celebrity’ murderer.

The symposium invites critical investigations of contemporary British writing published after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but whose narrative focus lies on the Eastern and Central European past of the Cold War period – the so-called ‘second world’.

We welcome abstracts (300 words) for 20-minute papers from researchers at all career stages. Contributions may address, but are not limited to, the following aspects:

Please submit your abstract and a short biographical note (in pdf) to secworld@anglistik.uni-halle.de
by 30 April 2022.

Publié dans Karine Hildenbrand, Figures de femmes assassines – Représentations et idéologies. Nice : Cycnos, volume 23 n°2, 2006


Rupture of the Social Contract, or Female Killers in the Works of P.D.
James
Delphine Cingal (Assistant Professor, University Panthéon-Assas-Paris II)
Biography:
Delphine Cingal is Senior Lecturer at the Université de Panthéon-Assas-Paris II. She defended a PHD thesis on P.D. James at the Sorbonne in 2000. She is the author of numerous articles in the realm of police novels. She is currently working on the image of the body in British literature in the XIX° and XX° centuries.

In brief:
This article analyses the attitude of women assassins in the works of P.D. James in relationship to their masculine equivalent. It shows as well how the police inquest thus becomes an interpretation of feminine expression in the most violent sense of the term. Finally, it delves into the echo of this violence on the female novelist as well as on the female reader: is there a feminine way of writing and reading violence? Is the police novel a means of assassination by proxy, without actually doing it, a catharsis of female killer urges ?
The XIX° century sees the emergence of a new literary genre: the detective novel. Little by little, in the criminal narrative, theft, kidnapping, and missing persons relinquish their place to a systematization of the most extreme physical  violence: that of murder.

Muriel Spark's Loitering with Intent projects metafiction as its key feature with regard to its complex narrative structure and it has several coatings of fiction-within-fiction and interrupts the reader's expectations of a genre by violating the generic boundaries. The present paper tries to uncover the self-reflexive and self-conscious personality of Spark as a writer which she tries to portray through metafiction. It also explores her art of narration and creation of fiction. Along with it, the paper also reflects its impact on her future novels which she wrote after Loitering with Intent.

Human beings perceive world as per their ideology, thinking patterns and acceptance of reality and illusion. There is great difference between what reality is as an abstract and concrete form. Simultaneously, what is real may not be concrete and what is concrete may not be real. The gap between concrete and abstract, reality and illusion is bridgedbyour perception. Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation presents the notion of hyperreality as a state when the replica, the simulation is superior to the real. The present paper focuses on the concept of simulacra and relation between the authenticity and replica in Julian Barnes' novel England, England. This paper is primarily based on concept of simulacra and the meaning of replica in the Julian Barnes's novel England, England. Simulacra and Simulation play great inspirational role in the narrative of England, England. Basically, the novel is divided into three parts.

Contemporary culture is caught in a representational bind: fascinated by - and yet tired of - its tendency towards artifice and involution, whilst simultaneously attracted to - and yet sceptical of - the idea of the authentic. The hermeneutical confusion brought about by this self-identity crisis has given rise to a semiotic indistinction around artificiality and authenticity, leaving the observer trapped not by their bipolarity, but caught within their layers as they interleave. This essay explores the ramifications of this through an examination of the relationship between Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Will Self’s Dorian: An Imitation (2002). Identifying the imitative intent of Self’s rewrite as problematic, the essay situates the twentieth-century’s shift towards an ethic of private authenticity over sincerity as indicative of a significant change in self and social understanding. However the demands and desires of late-capitalism have made it increasingly d...

Le roman populaire traditionnel montre des mères qui se sacrifient au bonheur de leurs enfants, qui cachent leur flétrissure, si injuste fût-elle, pour ne pas ternir l'honneur de leur progéniture. Les relations parents-enfants sont fondées sur le respect. On retrouve ce type d'idéal dans les romans d'Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile (1937) par exemple où Salomé, aussi nymphomane qu'elle puisse être, ne perd pas le soutien de sa fille. Chez P.D. James, grâce à la focalisation interne, le lecteur a accès aux pensées les plus intimes des protagonistes qui ne cherchent donc pas à dissimuler leurs raisonnements sous des couches d'excuses pour sauver la face et la morale. Ainsi, les relations parents-enfants, en particulier, celles qui devraient être les plus honnêtes, voire les plus pures, se trouvent perverties par le manque d'intérêt, le temps et l'argent. Dans A Certain Justice, les relations entre Drysdale Laud et sa mère s'espacent ; ils n'ont plus vraiment envie de faire le détour pour se rendre visite. It was, he thought, typical of her independence that she was beginning to question whether the detour was sensible at the end of a heavy day. Tower Bridge was inconvenient to reach from the West End and in winter particularly she disliked being late home. He suspected that the arrangement wouldn't last much longer and that for both of them its ending would be a source of only mild regret. (91) Toutefois, le cynisme des personnages de P.D. James renverse les poncifs familiaux du tout au tout. En effet, l'auteur a pris le contre-pied exact des romans populaires ou des grandes fresques romanesques.

This article offers an overview of typographical and experimental strategies employed in contemporary novel writing in the context of author-ing, authority, freedom and experience programming. Nicola Barker's novel H(a)ppy (2017) is discussed as an example of a rising trend in contemporary literary production characterised by an emphasis on multimodality and materiality of texts where the physicality of writing serves as a significant mode of communication, simultaneously aiming to transcend its medium. My claim is that although visually engaging and fascinating in itself, the typographical experimentation, apart from connoting a degree of liberation for both the writer and the reader, can also be looked at from the point of view of a particular "authoring," i.e. programming of reader's reception. This approach is contextualised against the backdrop of the theoretical discussion concerning the notion of author (Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida) as well as aspects of materiality of writing and of subverting authority in postmodern fiction and visions of the reader in multimodal texts. This is followed by a reading of the novel with reference to its themes of control and typographical experimentation. The article also recognises a performative aspect of such type of writing.

Rose Harris-Birtill introduces the David Mitchell special edition of C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings. Harris-Birtill provides a critical introduction to David Mitchell’s complete works, before discussing her experiences as organiser of the international David Mitchell Conference 2017, held at the University of St Andrews on 3rd June 2017, and its relationship to the special edition. Highlighting the dominance of David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas in both Mitchell’s UK book sales and across current literary criticism to date, Harris-Birtill introduces the articles in the special edition, summarising the contributions of each essay. Drawing on the conference discussion, and the decision to include the author in the event, Harris-Birtill argues for the importance of openly discussing the scholarly issues and rewards of working with living authors in the field of contemporary literature.

An ecopolitical thread runs throughout Zadie Smith’s fiction and non-fiction, problematising the author’s self-described ‘sentimental humanism’. In this article, I reflect on Smith’s narrative and essayistic treatment of animals in the context of insights drawn from the recent ‘nonhuman turn’ in critical theory and literary criticism. I argue that Smith’s work exhibits a fidelity to the existence of nonhuman alterity at the limits of human experience. In her narrative and essays, Smith threads a needle between understanding the human’s nonhuman origins and the inevitable self-referentiality of human signifying systems. I begin by examining how strategies of ‘soft representation’ across Smith’s writing deconstruct everyday anthropocentrism; I then analyse how her 2012 novel NW depicts British neoliberal ideology entangling urban foxes in human anxieties about race and class; finally, I discuss this novel’s search for potential solidarities among urban animals, human and nonhuman, who are marginalised under twenty-first-century neoliberal policies.

This chapter examines the way in which postcolonial theory and discourses related to racial identity have impacted on a number of writers concerned with interrogating notions of Englishness in their fiction. It begins by identifying the way in which national identity has been approached by a number of theorists in terms of its narrativized construction and its relationship with literary modes such as realism, modernism and postmodernism. In this context it addresses the work of Benedict Anderson, Ian Baucom, Homi Bhabha, Timothy Brennan, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Doreen Massey, Nelly Richard, and Sara Upstone. It goes on to explore the way in which English national identity can be seen to have gone thorough a process of gradual and sustained reconfiguration as a response to a series of discourses in the post Second-World-War period including the dismantling of empire, mass immigration to Britain resulting in a multicultural society, and discourses associated with decline in terms of Britain’s standing as a world power.

The second part of the chapter addresses the way in which English national and racial identities have been examined in the work of three writers using postmodern techniques in the period from the 1980s to the present. Salman Rushdie uses techniques associated with magic realism to examine the way in which national identity is constructed, and reconfigured. This is identified initially with respect to India in Midnight’s Children (1981) and Pakistan in Shame (1983), but this section concentrates on the way engagement with constructions of national identity is developed with respect to Englishness in The Satanic Verses (1988). The chapter shows in this latter novel that the perceived threat of invasion from immigrants begins to loosen established definitions of Englishness, at the same time as it imagines immigrants as monstrous or non-human invaders. The notion of foreignness in this context is explored both in terms of the novel’s thematic content and its deployment of literary modes. Julian Barnes’s England, England (1998) offers a deconstruction of the nation through its imaginative narrative of the creation of a theme park based on perceived and popular notions of Englishness. The novel engages with postmodern theories associated with Jean Baudrillard in terms of the way in which replicas and copies of national identity begin to shake the very fabric of the original upon which the copy is supposed to be based. In J.G. Ballard’s near-future dystopian novel, Kingdom Come (2006), England’s suburbs have been subsumed into a quasi-spiritual worship of consumerism, a process that leads to what one character in the novel defines as ‘soft fascism’. This results in a reconfiguration of a kind of Englishness that is located around sports clubs and St. George’s flags, and an inclusive attraction to the new social space of the Metro Centre, the novel’s representation of the kind of large scale shopping mall that has sprung up in Britain over the last twenty years or so. The novel examines the way in which the inclusivity around traditional national iconographies shows suspicion towards potential outsiders in terms of race and cultural ethnicity. This novel is discussed with reference to theories on fascism developed in the mid-twentieth century by Georges Bataille; and what Ballard observes as an examination of worrying developments in racial politics in Britain in the period after 9/11 and 7/7.