Contemporary British Novelist Research Articles

Rewriting Victorian Stereotypes: Questions of Female Identity in Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent

Contemporary British novelist Sarah Perry’s pastiche, The Essex Serpent (2016), goes beyond the way women were portrayed in 19th-century fiction in several ways, including their relationships with men. Therefore, it is worth having a closer look at the complexity of female-male relationships represented in the novel. After a brief outline of the social construct known as Victorian marriage, I will examine the three main female characters’ relationships with men, let them be husbands, suitors or, for that matter, comrades. In this way, I intend to prove that these women understand female-male relationships on a spectrum transcending the stereotypical roles offered to them by Victorian society.

Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop

The charming world of fairy tales used to be, for many ages, the favorite world for readers of fiction. Until the moment, these magical tales, their adventurous journeys, and happy endings provide a vital source of enchanting entertainment. Throughout her literary career, Angela Carter (1940-1992), a contemporary British novelist and a short story writer, shows interest in the employment of fairy tales in her works, producing what is called modern fairy tales. Her rewriting of these tales rendered her a remarkable woman advocate who calls for women’s legitimate rights and an appreciation and a recognition of their active position in societies, things that men enjoy and always receive. This paper tackles The Magic Toyshop (1967), Carter’s second novel. It discusses the fate of its young heroine, Melanie, and her siblings, Jonathan and Victoria, who have become orphans by the death of their parents in a plane crash while in America. Melanie journeys from her middle-class luxurious house to Uncle Phillip’s poor house located in South London. Like Cinderella, the orphan girl dreams of being a bride and marrying a handsome man while suffering under the oppression of a stepfather, Uncle Phillip. Unlike her, Melanie will be shocked to meet a different version of Prince Charming of her imagination.

Editorial

In our autumn edition in 2014 we published articles from a conference on ‘Writing Jews in Contemporary Britain’. They were guest edited for the issue by Axel Stähler and Sue Vice, the organisers of the conference. In their joint introduction they wrote:Contemporary British Jewish writers are being credited with an ‘attitude’ and their fiction is perceived to celebrate ‘the anarchic potential of the Jewish voice’.It will come as no surprise, particularly given what they quoted about ‘attitude’ and ‘anarchic potential’, that the first Jewish author they mentioned, because of his recent award at the time of the Man Booker Prize, was Howard Jacobson. One of the contributors to that issue was David Brauner writing on ‘Fetishizing the Holocaust: Comedy and Transatlantic Connections in Howard Jacobson’s Kalooki Nights’. When Bryan Cheyette and David Brauner approached the editor of this journal with the proposal to mark and celebrate Howard Jacobson’s eightieth birthday, the editorial board readily accepted the offer. The contents are introduced by Bryan Cheyette, and David Brauner contributes a new interview with Jacobson. The issue also contains a book review by Howard Cooper of David’s recent monograph on Jacobson in the Manchester University Press series Contemporary British Novelists.

J. G. Ballard’ın “The Ultimate City” Eserinde Ekotopya ve Petrokültür

James Graham Ballard was a contemporary British novelist who published a wide variety of works ranging from climate fiction to transgressive fiction. “The Ultimate City” (1976) is one of Ballard’s short stories that portrays a dystopian vision where a utopian urban experiment transforms into a catastrophe. The story tells the attempt of the protagonist, Halloway and his company to reanimate a city that was abandoned years ago due to oil depletion. Halloway aims to bring the city back to life through the limited amount of oil left in the city, only to confront chaos and disorder. Using the concepts of Ecotopia and petroculture, this article aims to explore the ways in which oil shapes and destroys modern societies and possible alternatives to this predicament in Ballard’s work. To this end, after a theoretical discussion of these concepts, the article examines the ecotopian features in the ecological community in the text and compares it to the consumerist culture of the metropolis; and later addresses the problem of oil that is an essential component of modern urban life. This part of the article reveals the degree of dependence on oil and the transformative power associated with it through examples from the story. The article argues that “The Ultimate City” is a premonition to the reader concerning the current energy politics that may culminate in a total disaster unless necessary steps are taken.

Old Age as Horror Vision or Comfort Zone in the Late Fiction of Contemporary British Novelists

Abstract Old people have always figured in literature, but the unprecedented and worldwide growth of longevity in the twentieth century has triggered new fictional approaches to the topic of aging. Thus, since the late 1980 s, an ever growing number of established British writers, reaching their own advanced years, have written on age from an insider’s perspective, creating old main characters and focusing on their mental and physical experiences. I have examined six of such novels, published between 1986 and 2019, trying to find out how the authors construct their heroes’ and heroines’ aging selves by imagining their attitudes to certain central issues like time, death, physical decay and human relationships. Of the classical formative categories (gender, class, ethnicity, etc.) gender has proved to be the most essential, especially when it comes to the perspectives on time. While the view of heroes created by male writers remains fixed on the past, often with nostalgia, sometimes with regret, the women authors’ heroines focus on their present situation with a view to the future, represented by children and grandchildren. Class turned out to be a second important category: the (uncontemplated) safe middle-class position of all protagonists appears as an indispensable precondition for the free choice of attitude to the challenges of aging.

Analysis of Female Masculinity During Wartime in The Night Watch From the Perspective of Gender Performativity

The novel The Night Watch（2006）by Sarah Waters, a contemporary British novelist, tells the story of four women whose fortunes were intertwined before and after World War II. By Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, this paper analyzes the wartime female images in the novel. Women’ s wartime drag subverts the binary opposition of people’s presupposed notion about sex and women’ s occupation of men’ job that breaks the fictitious perception of gender opposition; the lesbian love affairs challenge the compulsory heterosexuality. Through the interpretations of the feminist thoughts conveyed by Waters in The Night Watch and Butler’s theory of gender performativity, it can be discovered that the nature of gender identity is actually fictional and can be constructed, reflecting the appeal for gender equality.

Deceptive Style of Writing in Ian McEwan’s <i>Atonement</i>

Ian McEwan, together with Martin Amis is regarded as the best-known and controversial contemporary British novelist. He has been regarded as a serious, objective writer who is interested in writing about obsessive behavior, sex and moral corruption. When Atonement appeared in 2001, it received widespread praise from the reviewers, especially in respect of its style and narrative structure. This paper is concerned with the deceptive style of McEwan’s Atonement, with the exposure of the narrative as an artifact. The identity of Briony is discussed from two aspects: on the one hand, she is a character who is as real as others. On the other hand, she finally becomes the real author of the novel, revealing the process of the construction of this story. Thus, by giving Briony two identities, the writer deceives the reader into his beautiful lie and awakens them with the same metafictional device, laying bare its nature of artifice. Through the study and analysis, it is safe to conclude that Atonement possesses the main features of metafiction. The application of deceptive writing renders the novel more aesthetic significance and meaning.

GOD APPEARS IN ALL: JULIAN BARNES’ A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 10½ CHAPTERS

The creator of nature, the God is the Father of all, the Creator of the Universe and the Supreme Deity.He is also the Father of Jesus Christ and Saviour to His followers. God is seen in many ways, through miacles, such as the appearance of the butterfly when a crew is desperately lost at sea, the rainbow as a covenant toNoah, the actions of the raven and the dove. The present paper focuses on the presence of God in The History of the World in 10½ Chapters by the contemporary British novelist, Julian Patrick Barnes. The novel with ten and a half chapters represents the trust and faith towards the Supreme Power by means of water. Barnesrefers Him directly, indirectly or through the use of metaphor in every story of the novel. The paper draws attention on the actions of the God in the chapters of the novel with regard to nature.

When the Personal and the Historical Collide: Re-imagining Memory in Penelope Lively’s Making It Up

ABSTRACTIn her ‘anti-memoir’ entitled Making It Up (2005), contemporary British novelist Penelope Lively rewrites key episodes of her life story and her personal history by fictionalising them. Taking the voice of different characters who were important in Lively's personal and social development, the author revises each of the eight personal and historical episodes that conform her ‘anti-memoir’. By distancing herself from her real self through fiction, Lively highlights the unfaithful nature of time and memory together with the constructed nature of narrative when recounting personal and collective history. On the other hand, Making It Up points out to the close interrelationship between the personal and the historical in an era, the twentieth century, riddled with traumatic events which escaped the author's immediate understanding but which she successfully recaptures and reorders through fictionalised narrative.

Rewriting Conrad: Conradian Crosscurrents in Conceptual Writing

In this essay, I begin with the contemporary British novelist, Iain Sinclair, and the contemporary London-based visual artist, Sarah Jacobs, responding to and rewriting Conrad's works. The main focus of the essay, however, is recent works by three poets who, in different ways, address the task of rewriting Con-rad. Appropriation in relation to literary production has a long history. More recently, with Conceptual Writing (in the work of Kenneth Goldsmith, Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place) appropriation has become an integral (but also controversial) poetic practice. This essay focuses on Rod Mengham's video poems based on Heart of Darkness and "Amy Foster"; Yedda Morrison's treated text version of Heart of Darkness, creating a new work by the process of erasure; and Peter Jaeger's The Shadow Line with its reframing and reconfiguring of Conrad's text. The essay concludes with a brief account of a recent collection of poems by various hands, all of which treat, revise, and respond to works by Conrad. Conrad's insistence on le mot juste, his attention to concrete detail, and his fine ear for the cadences of English prose have created texts that have proved attractive to (and productive resources for) contemporary poets.

The Experimental Techniques in Ian McEwan’s <i>Atonement</i>

Ian McEwan, together with Martin Amis, is now the best-known and controversial contemporary British novelist. Atonement is regarded as the best of McEwan books and is shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It displays features of modernism and postmodernism, with the application of stream of consciousness, multiple voices, montage and flashbacks, becoming increasingly experimental in form.

被忽视的非典型弱势群体—对《爱无可忍》中杰德&#8226帕里命运的反思

英国当代作家伊恩ž麦克尤恩1997年的小说《爱无可忍》讲述了科普作家乔ž罗斯努力摆脱“德ž克莱拉鲍特综合症”患者杰德ž帕里的故事。按照美国学者玛莎ž努斯鲍姆的分类，帕里属于非典型弱势群体的一员。在与这些易被社会忽视的人群打交道时，人文关怀更为重要。在故事中，乔正是因为陷入了过度的科学实证研究，才在无意之间不断将帕里引向疯狂。尽管乔的妻子克拉莉莎努力用自己的诗学智慧去影响他，但并没有能够改变事件的走向。这也从一个侧面说明以乔为代表的科学理性占据主导地位，遮盖了人文学者的声音。本文目的便在于通过帕里的遭遇，反思当今社会对待弱势群体的态度，呼吁社会给予他们更多的关心和爱护，也以此提醒人们人文关怀在妥善处理相应关系时的重要性。 Enduring Love, published by contemporary British novelist Ian McEwan in 1997, tells the story about a pop-science writer Joe Rose who attempts to rid himself of a mad stalker Jed Parry, a pa-tient of de Clerambault’s syndrome. Being a member of the atypical disadvantaged group, as classified by American scholar Martha Nussbaum, Parry is representative of the neglected people whose fates highlight the importance of humanistic care. In the story, Joe has been obsessed with the excessive rationalistic study of Parry’s case, and has unknowingly led to the worsening of Parry’s situation. Joe’s wife Clarrisa tries to influence him with her poetic wisdom, but her mild nature is not powerful enough to change the direction of the event, which actually reveals that Joe’s dominant rationalism has overshadowed the role of humanistic scholars like Clarrisa. Through Parry’s situation, this article believes that special care should be given to the disadvantaged group, and that humanities do play an indispensable role in society.

Postmodern Strategies in Ian McEwan’s Major Novels

Ian McEwan, together with Martin Amis is now the best-known and controversial contemporary British novelist. McEwan seems to be interested in the relationship between reality and imagina-tion, history and fabrication in the process of writing, which is generally considered as one of the themes related to postmodern metafiction writing. He also adopts the postmodern intertextuality in his writing practice. Those postmodern concerns and strategies confirm his position as a post-modernist.

Post-War British Women Novelists and the Canon

Post-War British Women Novelists and the Canon seeks to investigate why certain women writers in the latter half of the twentieth century have become canonical and why others have not. By the end of the book, Turner claims that readers “will be able to see exactly why somebody like Zadie Smith has been ‘canonized’ at the start of the twenty-first century, and why so many writers, past and present, are not seen as the appropriate focus of scholarship” (10). The aim of this book is an interesting and ambitious one. Mapping the field of post-war women’s fiction in relation to the market, prize culture, and the academy is undoubtedly a worthwhile (in fact an enormous) task. However, Turner’s aims are actually slightly more modestly focused, in that his four main chapters (after an introductory one on “Theories of the Canon”) discuss Iris Murdoch, Anita Brookner, Ruth Rendell, and Emma Tennant. In themselves, each writer presents an extremely interesting case, although it is not clear precisely why Turner has chosen to focus specifically on these writers to the exclusion of others, other than for his own personal interest. In Murdoch’s case, Turner suggests that now is an appropriate time to consider her oeuvre and legacy, given that it is fifty years since her first novel was published and ten years since her death. Brookner is “the first of three among many contemporary British novelists whose relationship with the canon merits interrogation” (62). Turner argues that her fiction is “odd and highly distinctive” (62). What draws Turner to Rendell as an appropriate subject for his penultimate chapter is the fact that she works “solidly within genre fiction, and yet … has followers claiming that she produces novels whose value exceeds her peers on the literary side of the fence” (86). And in the case of Tennant, Turner seems to be puzzled by the fact that “a writer may be post-modern, and feminist, but not achieve acclaim” (114).

Alexa Alfer and Amy J. Edward de Campos, A.S. Byatt; Critical Storytelling, ‘Contemporary British Novelists’

If this monograph on A.S. Byatt’s work (that comes just after Susana Onega’s monograph on Jeanette Winterson in the ‘Contemporary British Novelists’ series) can be added to a long list of critical work on Byatt’s fiction (including unpublished doctoral theses), it clearly integrates, re-works, and adds to previous criticism. Indeed, the eight pages of selected reviews and, especially, the fifteen pages of selected criticism of Byatt’s fiction offer an almost exhaustive list of all that has be...

The Philosophical Deadlock in Iris Murdoch's The Bell and The Sea, The Sea

The fiction of the contemporary British novelist Iris Murdoch hinges on the successful mingling between the epistemological and philosophical on the one hand and the artistic and aesthetic on the other. There is an overriding and recurrent postulate in her fiction: the disparity between one's conscious and deliberate plans and what one eventually achieves. This philosophical view forms the constituent elements of two of her famous novels, The Bell (1958) and The Sea, The Sea (1978). This study explores the problematics of how this leitmotif is manifested in these two novels and the mechanism of showing that as well as the salient characteristics of her art and writing..

Notes on Contributors

Fiona Tolan is a Lecturer in English at Liverpool John Moores University. Her research is predominantly concerned with contemporary literature, particularly British and Canadian fiction, and women’s writing. She is author of Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction (Rodopi, 2007) and co-editor of Writers Talk: Conversations with Contemporary British Novelists (Continuum, 2008). She is also Associate Editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Susan Hall received her PhD in English from Cornell University in January 2008. She is an assistant professor of English at Cameron University, where she teaches courses on American literature and literary theory. Rebecca Saunders teaches global literatures, theory, and African studies at Illinois State University. She is the author of Lamentation and Modernity in Literature, Philosophy and Culture (Palgrave), and numerous articles on texts from France, Greece, Morocco, and South Africa. She is editor and co-author of The Concept of the Foreign: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue (Lexington)...

"Specters of Kath": Negatives and Negativity in Penelope Lively's The Photograph

"Specters of Kath"Negatives and Negativity in Penelope Lively's The Photograph Laurence Petit (bio) Critics and photographers insist on the lethal and petrifying power of the photographic act, through which the subject becomes reified and disincarnated in a "micro-experience of death," as Barthes puts it in Camera Lucida (La Chambre claire 14). The photographic act seen as an "embalming" is such that the subject photographed "truly [becomes] a specter," Barthes goes on to say (14), thus taking up again almost word for word Susan Sontag's analysis in On Photography for whom photographic images are "ghost images," "death masks," and even "memento mori" (84, 168, 26). Conversely, the photographic image—whether its referent in the real world is already dead or still alive—has this quasi-magical power of maintaining it in an illusion of perpetual life, as it is cut off from time, and therefore of endowing it with a spectral quality. Photography as the trace of a body without a body, a "paradoxical incorporation" (Derrida 6) or the "tangible intangibility of a proper body without flesh" (7), as Derrida puts it, thus corresponds to the definition of the specter as a "phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit" that he gives in Specters of Marx (6). Much has been said about the literary use of photography for realistic purposes—photography being on the side of evidence, of authenticity because of its indexicality—or illusionistic ones—photography being a construct, and as such capable of lying and deceiving. Less has perhaps been made of its spectral nature and the fictional games made possible by what Régis Durand calls the "photographic [End Page 220] fantastic" (77). Fiction, whose vocation is also to give life, through the reading process, to "paper beings" (Barthes, Le Bruissement de la langue 68), is in that sense akin to the spectral nature of photography, with the exception of its indexicality. As such, it will feed on the multiple combinations made possible by the inclusion in praesentia or in absentia of the photographic image within the text. The novel entitled The Photograph by contemporary British novelist Penelope Lively, which was published in England in 2003, seems to be a perfect illustration of the close links between photography, spectrality, and fiction. The novel starts with the discovery by an academic, Glyn, of a compromising photograph revealing an adulterous relationship, years ago, between his late wife Kath and a man (the photograph showing them hand in hand, but only from the back) who turns out to be his own brother-in-law. This photograph in absentia, since it is evoked ekphrastically but never materially reproduced in the text, is the starting point of an investigation carried out by the husband among Kath's family and friends—Elaine, her sister, Nick, her husband, and Oliver, her long-time and platonic friend—an investigation whose unexpected revelations will completely change their lives. What makes this novel interesting is not so much the by now fairly common way in which the photograph as matrix generates both the narrative and the "re-incarnation" of the deceased character, the photograph thus becoming a "medium" in both senses of the term. Neither is it the resolutely spectral nature of Kath, in death of course since she haunts every single character in the story, but also in life, where her sudden appearances were already "apparitions," ghostly "manifestations." And neither is it the profound irony of a text in which the secret "delivered" by the photograph as matrix or "mother" of the narrative is precisely that Kath cannot have children—those equally as ghostly "non-babies" (Lively 221) who will cause her to end her life. What makes this novel truly original is, as Janice Hart claims, "its photographic-ness" (118), or "photographicity," as François Soulages calls it after Todorov's "literarity"—namely, "what is photographic in photography," "this abstract property which is the uniqueness of photography" (Soulages 1). However, whereas Janice Hart remains quite vague regarding what she calls "[Penelope Lively's] profound ability … to think photographically" (112), merely evoking photography's nature as "portal" enabling the deceased character to step out of the petrifying image and become alive again, we...

Jeanette Winterson, by Susana Onega (Manchester: Manchester U.P. Contemporary British Novelists, 2006)

Jeanette Winterson, by Susana Onega (Manchester: Manchester U.P. Contemporary British Novelists, 2006)

The contemporary British novel – a French perspective

In her contribution, journalist and critic Florence Noiville takes a look at the British literary scene from her Parisian vantage point. What she discovers is the ability of contemporary British novelists to combine history and politics with humour and entertainment, thus neither relegating history and politics to the background nor turning their works into dry novels of ideas. Rather, in the works of writers such as Jonathan Coe and others, individual lives are intertwined with the bigger picture, thus turning the contemporary British novel into a refreshing source for their (French) readers and providing ample material for a kind of literary – cultural exchange.