Introduction: Questions of Class in the Contemporary British Novel

Abstract

The central aim of this book is to offer a critique postmodern theory’s idealization of contemporary British literature and culture as a space of fluid, flexible decentered subjects, and to argue that beneath this celebration of hybridity and difference lie clear evasions and erasures of class. Using a variety of materialist theories, this book explores how the ideological and political pressure to erase class in the period from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair produces the return of class as a troubling subterranean and repressed element in contemporary literature, theory, and culture. Offering critical readings from a range of recently canonized middle-class authors such as Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Peter Ackroyd, Jonathan Coe, as well as Kazuo Ishiguro, Pat Barker, Will Self, and Alan Hollinghurst, I hope to reveal that the contemporary British novel, assisted by “class blind” postideological literary theories, both articulates and silences questions of class, thereby enabling and sustaining the ideological notion of a “classless” contemporary British literature and culture.KeywordsLiterary CriticismIdentity PoliticsClass InequalitySuper ClassClassless SocietyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.