Table Of ContentTwenty-First Century Fiction
Also by Siân Adiseshiah
CHURCHILL’S SOCIALISM: Political Resistance in the Plays of Caryl Churchill
Twenty-First Century
Fiction
What Happens Now
Edited by
Siân Adiseshiah
Senior Lecturer in English, University of Lincoln, UK
and
Rupert Hildyard
Principal Lecturer in English, University of Lincoln, UK
Selection, introduction and editorial matter © Siân Adiseshiah and
Rupert Hildyard 2013
Individual chapters © Contributors
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-03517-2
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First published 2013 by
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Contents
Notes on Contributors vii
1 Introduction: What Happens Now 1
Siân Adiseshiah and Rupert Hildyard
2 ‘Such a Thing as Avant-Garde Has Ceased to Exist’:
The Hidden Legacies of the British Experimental Novel 15
Jennifer Hodgson
3 Tough Shit Erich Auerbach: Contingency and Estrangement
in David Peace’s Occupied City and Kate Summerscale’s
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher 34
Phil Redpath
4 When the Two Sevens Clash: David Peace’s Nineteen
Seventy-Seven as ‘Occult History’ 49
Dean Lockwood
5 Remaindered Books: Glen Duncan’s Twenty-First
Century Novels 66
Alice Bennett
6 ‘The journey creates us. We become the frontiers
we cross’: Stepping Across Lines in Salman Rushdie’s
Shalimar the Clown 81
Daniel O’Gorman
7 ‘The Private Rooms and Public Haunts’: Theatricality
and the City of London in Michel Faber’s The Crimson
Petal and the White 97
Lin Pettersson
8 ‘This is my Opa. Do you remember him killing the Jews?’
Rachel Seiffert’s ‘Micha’ and the Transgenerational
Haunting of a Silenced Past 115
María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro
9 A Voice without a Name: Gothic Homelessness in
Ali Smith’s Hotel World and Trezza Azzopardi’s Remember Me 132
Emily Horton
v
vi Contents
10 Ghosts of Postmodernity: Spectral Epistemology and
Haunting in Hilary Mantel’s Fludd and Beyond Black 147
Wolfgang Funk
11 Intimations of Immortality: Semiologies of Ageing and
the Lineaments of Eternity in Contemporary Prose 162
Lucy Perry
12 Crosshatching: Boundary Crossing in the Post-Millennial
British Boom 183
Jude Roberts
13 ‘You just know when the world is about to break apart’:
Utopia, Dystopia and New Global Uncertainties in
Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army 197
Iain Robinson
14 Finding the Right Kind of Attention: Dystopia
and Transcendence in John Burnside’s Glister 212
Florian Niedlich
Select Bibliography 224
Index 232
Notes on Contributors
Siân Adiseshiah is Senior Lecturer in English in the School of
Humanities, University of Lincoln, UK. Her research interests are in
politics and literature, twenty-first century fiction, contemporary
theatre and utopian studies. She is author of Churchill’s Socialism:
Political Resistance in the Plays of Caryl Churchill and has published
widely on contemporary theatre in a variety of journals, includ-
ing Modern Drama, Comparative Drama, Utopian Studies, Studies in
Musical Theatre, C21 Literature: Journal of Twenty-first Century Writings,
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies and Times Higher
Education. She is also Coordinator of Lincoln’s 21st Century Research
Group.
Alice Bennett is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature in the
English Department at Liverpool Hope University. Her most recent work
is Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction (2012), a study of fiction
set in imaginary worlds after death and the consequences this has for
experimentation with narrative forms. She has also published work in
Textual Practice and the Oxford Literary Review.
Wolfgang Funk is a research assistant at Leibniz University Hanover.
He has published articles on contemporary British and American
drama and fiction, among others on Bryony Lavery (2007), Jasper
Fforde (2010), Martin McDonagh (2010), Dave Eggers (2011) and Jez
Butterworth (2011). He is the co-editor of Fiktionen von Wirklichkeit:
Authentizität zwischen Materialität und Konstruktion (2011) and The
Aesthetics of Authenticity: Medial Constructions of the Real (2012). His
research interests include utopian writing, the relationship of represen-
tation and reality and contemporary British drama.
Rupert Hildyard is Principal Lecturer in English at the University of
Lincoln. His research background is in modernism and the short story
and his current research interests centre on ecocriticism, the study of
literature and culture in the context of ecological crisis. He has pub-
lished recently on the fiction and journalism of John Lanchester and
is currently working on English ‘farm texts’ of the twentieth century.
He is currently writing on the work of the ecological historian Oliver
Rackham.
vii
viii Notes on Contributors
Jennifer Hodgson is currently completing a PhD on British experimen-
tal writing in the 1960s at Durham University and is the UK Editor at
Dalkey Archive Press.
Emily Horton is a Visiting Lecturer in English Literature at Brunel
University. Her research interests include contemporary British and
American fiction, specialising in trauma fiction; contemporary genre
and popular fiction; and contemporary explorations of globalisation
and cosmopolitanism. She is currently co-editing a volume with Philip
Tew and Leigh Wilson on The 1980s: A Decade in Contemporary Fiction,
and another with Monica Germanà on Ali Smith (both forthcoming
with Continuum). Her first monograph, entitled Contemporary Crisis
Fictions, is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan. Other recent and
forthcoming publications include writing on Ian McEwan, Kazuo
Ishiguro, Pat Barker, John Burnside, Alan Hollinghurst and Kamila
Shamsie.
Dean Lockwood is a Senior Lecturer in Media Theory in the School of
Media, University of Lincoln, UK. His academic background is in the soci-
ology of contemporary culture and he holds a DPhil from the University
of York. Recent research has focused on the role of ‘noise’ in its various
guises in the politics of affect. Journal articles and contributions to edited
collections have explored this in the areas of visual, auditory and literary
culture, covering, for example, post-punk/industrial music and contem-
porary trends in horror film, weird fiction and crime fiction. Cloud Time,
a book written with Rob Coley, which extends these concerns to the cul-
ture of ‘cloud computing’, was published by Zero Books in 2012.
María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro is Senior Lecturer in English at the
Department of English and German Philology of the University of
Zaragoza, Spain. At present, she is one of the members of a research
team working on ethics, trauma and memory in contemporary fiction in
English. Her interests focus on these subjects, with a special emphasis on
the field of Holocaust literature and Holocaust trauma. Her latest publica-
tions include book chapters on: Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose (in Between the Urge
to Know and the Need to Deny: Trauma and Ethics in Contemporary British and
American Literature, 2011); Art Spiegelman’s Maus (in Other People’s Pain:
Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics, 2011); and Martin Amis’s
Time’s Arrow (in Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction,
2011). More recent articles on Nicci French’s The Memory Game and on
Holocaust fairy tales are forthcoming (in Critical Engagements and in
Dossiers Feministes, respectively).
Notes on Contributors ix
Florian Niedlich teaches British Literature and Cultural Studies at
the University of Würzburg, Germany. He is currently working on his
doctoral dissertation on the work of J. G. Ballard. His research interests
comprise postcolonial studies, contemporary Anglophone literature,
critical theory, popular culture, and representations and theories of
excess. His publications include articles on postcolonial literature,
contemporary British and American fiction, Hollywood movies, music
videos, as well as the edited volume Facetten der Popkultur. Über die
ästhetische und politische Kraft des Populären.
Daniel O’Gorman is completing a PhD in post-9/11 fiction and criti-
cal theory in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University
of London, and has taught English Literature, Creative Writing, and
Visual and Material Culture at Buckinghamshire New University. He has
recently published a book chapter on Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress
of Florence, and has a chapter on his non-fiction currently in press.
Daniel is also a co-convenor of the Literary and Critical Theory Seminar
at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, and has been
on the organising board of three Royal Holloway graduate conferences:
‘Postcolonial Memory: Resistance, Representation, and Revival’ (2009),
‘Uncertainty: Theory in the 21st Century’ (2011), and ‘The Future of
Arts Research’ (2011).
Lucy Perry recently completed her PhD, ‘Intimations of Immortality:
Semiologies of Ageing and the Lineaments of Eternity in Modern and
Contemporary Prose’ at Lancaster University. Her research interests
focus on the role of medicine in shaping language, literature and read-
ership. She now lives in Nablus, Palestine, and lectures at An-Najah
National University.
Lin Pettersson is member of the Department of English, French and
German at the University of Málaga, Spain, where she teaches English
literature and English for specific purposes. She is currently working on
her PhD which addresses issues of feminist geography in neo-Victorian
fiction focusing on gender, place and space by reconsidering the
public/private dichotomy. Her publications include a chapter entitled
‘Gendered Acts of Performance in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet’
in Current Trends in Anglophone Studies: Cultural, Linguistic and Literary
Research (2011) and the forthcoming volume Gender Performance and
Spatial Negotiation in Neo-Victorian Fiction.
Phil Redpath is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln,
UK. He specialises in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and
