The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction

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.

Nick Bentley is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Keele University, UK. He is author of Martin Amis (2015), Contemporary British Fiction (2008), Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (2007) and editor of British Fiction of the 1990s (2005).

Nick Hubble is Reader in English at Brunel University London, UK. He is co-editor of The Science Fiction Handbook (2013), The 1970s (2014) and The 1990s (2015) all published by Bloomsbury.

Leigh Wilson is Reader in Modern Literature at the University of Westminster, UK. She is the author of Modernism (2007) and Modernism and Magic (2013) and co-editor of The 1980s (2014) and The 1990s (2015) published by Bloomsbury.

Contents

Series Editors' Preface
Acknowledgements
Contributors

Introduction: Fiction of the 2000s: Political Contexts, Seeing the Contemporary, and the End(s) of Postmodernism
Nick Bentley, Nick Hubble and Leigh Wilson

1 Literary History of the Decade: Fiction from the Borderlands
Martyn Colebrook

2 Special Topic 1: Subcultural fictions: Youth subcultures in twenty-first century British fiction.
Nick Bentley

3 Special Topic 2: Translating Neuroscience: Fictions of the Brain in the 2000s
Laura Salisbury

4 Postcolonial and Diasporic Voices: Contemporary British Fiction in an Age of Transnational Terror
Lucienne Loh

5 Historical Representations: Reality Effects: the historical novel and the crisis of fictionality in the first decade of the twenty-first century
Leigh Wilson

6 Generic Discontinuities and Variations Daniel Weston

7 International Contexts 1: The American Reception of British Fiction in the 2000s

Anne Marie Adams

8 International Contexts 2: From multicultural enthusiasm to the 'failure of multiculturalism': British multi-ethnic fiction in an international frame
Ulrike Tancke

Timeline of Works
Timeline of National Events
Timeline of International Events
Biographies of Writers
Index

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