Contemporary British Literature Research Articles

Human Relationships and Memory in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day: A Critical Analysis

This study offers a critical analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and focuses on its portrayal of human relationships, specifically those associated with the main character, Stevens. Ishiguro, a well-known figure in contemporary English literature, is known for his insightful exploration of missed opportunities, a theme central to this novel. Within the narrative, Stevens inability to express his love for Miss Kenton, represents one of these missed chances. Like Ishiguro’s other novels, this one shows a large interest in the relationship between individual and collective memory. This study adopts a character analysis approach to examine Stevens' personality throughout his life career at Darlington Hall. The analysis aims to highlight the complexities he encounters in his relationships and demonstrate how he becomes aware of them by the end of the novel. This self-awareness develops as Stevens reflects on his past, helping him identify the errors he made in his relationships. This paper is structured into three sections. It starts with an introduction which addresses Ishiguro’s status as a novelist, with special attention on his main novels, including The Remains of the Day. The second part discusses the relationships in the novel by conducting a textual analysis of its important passages. Finally, the paper ends with the conclusion which sums up the findings.

Literature and reading under the light of intermedial and multimodality studies

Professor Grzegorz Maziarczyk specialises in contemporary English and American literature and culture as well as transmedial narrative theory. His main research interests include textual materiality, intermediality, relations between literature and new media, multimodal storytelling, utopia and dystopia. He has been a recipient of fellowships and research grants from the University of Notre Dame, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and European Society for the Study of English. He is the author of two monographs – The Narratee in Contemporary British Fiction (2005) and The Novel as Book: Textual Materiality in Contemporary Fiction in English (2013) – and the co-editor of five collections of essays, including (Im)perfection Subverted, Reloaded and Networked: Utopian Discourse across Media (2015) and Explorations of Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction (2017). He has published widely in edited collections and peer-reviewed journals, including Word & Image, Journal of Narrative Theory, Utopian Studies, Interfaces: Image, Texte, Language and Slavia amongst others. Since 2019 he has been Director of the Institute of Literary Studies at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin

INTERPOL 100 ‘Connecting Police For a Safer World’

Aim: The aim of this paper is to outline the century-long, instructive history of international police cooperation.Methodology: The authors of the paper analyse and organise the pre-WWII Hungarian and contemporary English literature, as well as the data published on the INTERPOL website to mark the anniversary.Findings: The predecessor organisation was set up in 1923 with the idea that police forces in different countries should work together to detect crime and curb cross-border crime through arrest and extradition procedures, identification techniques and criminal records. Many of the objectives and tools of that time are still the basis for joint work today. As security challenges and international organized crime activities and technological responses to them evolved, INTERPOL grew into the effective international organisation that now supports and coordinates the work of law enforcement agencies in 195 countries.Value: This milestone anniversary of INTERPOL provides an opportunity to look back over the last century of international police cooperation. The study takes a fresh look at the subject. It briefly presents the contemporary Hungarian reception of the initial steps in organisational and technical development, INTERPOL’s own assessment of the past 100 years, and the analyses of certain periods published by foreign experts on the subject.

The Pied Piper as a Killer in London: China Miéville’s Novel King Rat

This study examines how the story of The Pied Piper of Hamelin is re-told in China Miéville’s novel King Rat in London by combining elements of urban fantasy and arguing that the boundaries between the real and the fantasy world are blurred in the city of London. China Miéville is regarded as one of the most remarkable contemporary British Fantasy literature writers. In King Rat, blending the familiar cityscape with elements of myth, magic and horror creates a rich environment where ordinary lives intersect with extraordinary forces. By analysing the thematic and stylistic features of the novel, this study will reveal how King Rat exemplifies the basic elements of urban fantasy, focusing on the setting, characters, and fantastic elements and how it makes an important contribution to the genre. This analysis will provide readers with a detailed panorama of the interplay between urban settings, fantastic elements, and dark themes in contemporary literature.

INTERPOL 100 ‘Connecting Police For a Safer World’

Aim: The aim of this paper is to outline the century-long, instructive history of international police cooperation.Methodology: The authors of the paper analyse and organise the pre-WWII Hungarian and contemporary English literature, as well as the data published on the INTERPOL website to mark the anniversary.Findings: The predecessor organisation was set up in 1923 with the idea that police forces in different countries should work together to detect crime and curb cross-border crime through arrest and extradition procedures, identification techniques and criminal records. Many of the objectives and tools of that time are still the basis for joint work today. As security challenges and international organized crime activities and technological responses to them evolved, INTERPOL grew into the effective international organisation that now supports and coordinates the work of law enforcement agencies in 195 countries.Value: This milestone anniversary of INTERPOL provides an opportunity to look back over the last century of international police cooperation. The study takes a fresh look at the subject. It briefly presents the contemporary Hungarian reception of the initial steps in organisational and technical development, INTERPOL’s own assessment of the past 100 years, and the analyses of certain periods published by foreign experts on the subject.

Dialect Diversity in Modern English Literature: A Study of "Shuggie Bain" and "There There"

This research explores dialect diversity in contemporary English literature through a comparative analysis of two seminal works, Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart and There There by Tommy Orange. The purpose of this study is to unravel the nuanced ways in which authors employ dialects to convey unique cultural and socio-economic contexts, contributing to the broader discourse on linguistic diversity in literature. Using a qualitative research approach, the researcher closely examines the stylistic choices made by the authors, mapping out the dialectical variations present in the narratives and their significance. Through a detailed linguistic analysis, recurring patterns and variations in both novels are identified, shedding light on the role of dialect in character development, setting, and narrative voice. The findings reveal that dialect diversity serves as a powerful tool in characterizing the struggles, identities, and histories of multifarious communities. Additionally, it highlights how these authors challenge conventional literary norms, enriching the reader's experience with authentic voices and perspectives. This study underscores the pivotal role of dialect diversity in contemporary English literature, emphasizing its potential to bridge gaps and foster empathy among readers while amplifying underrepresented voices in the literary canon.

Van Gogh and British Literature: The Influence of Felix Holt on His Mind and Art

Vincent van Gogh (1853–90) was an artist of remarkable intellect and self-discipline, who was dedicated to learning to the end of his tragically brief life: “It’s a study I need, for I want to learn,” he noted in September 1889, just some months before his death.1 He believed that “one has to learn to read, as one has to learn to see and learn to live” (letter 155). He thus took reading very seriously and incorporated it into his life and art. In fact, Van Gogh was an ardent reader of world literature. A polyglot, he read Dutch, German, French, and British literature in the original languages.2 His interest in British literature, which dated from his childhood, was intensified in his early twenties when he lived and worked in London as an apprentice of Goupil & Cie, a renowned international art dealership. This formative period in Britain from 1873 to 1876 laid the foundation for the development of the young artist-to-be’s thoughts and worldview.3 By the time Van Gogh arrived, Britain, caught up in the ongoing process of industrialization, urbanization, and political reform, represented the most advanced modern civilization and its contradictions. Its capital was, in Charles Dickens’s terms, “a great (and dirty) city” that exhibited the complex spectacle of a modern metropolis: alongside the scenes of unrivalled wealth and glamor were those of widespread pauperism and inequality.4 Life in Victorian Britain with its splendor and squalor amazed the Dutchman:“I can’t tell you how interesting it is to see London and the trade and the way of life here, which are so very different from ours,” he wrote to his brother Theo in November 1873 (letter 15). This British sojourn also stirred social consciousness in him, drawing his attention to contemporary British art and literature, which squarely engaged with the topical issues of the day.5

DAVID MITCHELL IN THE VISION OF LITERARY CRITICS

David Mitchell is a British writer known for his unusual writing that often mixes different genres, time periods and cultures. His novels can be described as postmodern and metafictional, making him one of the most unique and prominent writers in contemporary English literature. This article examines the opinions and attitudes of critics towards David Mitchell and his work.

From Blurring to Transcending: Emily’s Epiphany and Shaping of Community of Shared Future in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge

Caryl Phillips (1958-), a leading novelist in Contemporary British literature is acclaimed as one of the best-known and most talented Black British writers of his West Indian generation. Cambridge, his fourth novel and regarded as the most Caribbean and universal novel, has garnered flowering acclaims at home and abroad since publication in 1991. The article elaborates on the implications of Emily’s epiphany from muti-perspectives framed within the framework of epiphany. Through a systematic study of Emily’s epiphany, it is to point out the refreshing implications, namely, the affinities between the colonizers and the colonized, blur the epistemic boundaries and further indicate that through blurring and transcending boundaries, mutual empathy and telepathy could be evoked among people from different social hierarchies with a community of shared future for mankind shaped.

GROßSTÄDTE ALS TOPOI DER MIGRATIONSKRISE IN DEUTSCHSPRACHIGER LITERATUR AM ANFANG DES 21. JAHRHUNDERTS

The following paper offers a transgeneric analysis of three contemporary German literary texts which shows how the plot setting - which is in all these cases an urban environment, i.e. a city – can be described as a topos to address ongoing migration crises. These urban places of action and the depicted migration crises create a state of paradox and irony: big cities attract the population and represent a place that is desirable to live in, yet they seem to marginalize and ostracize the very groups that migrate towards them. The research presented in this paper stems from an ongoing research project that deals with the phenomenon of crisis in contemporary English, German and Croatian literature, with an emphasis on systems in crisis, where the systems are defined from a sociological perspective as the family, the local community, the state, the region, and so on. The research was conducted within the installation research project “UIP-2020-02-3695 Analysis of Systems in Crisis and of New Consciousness in 21st Century Literature” (2021.-2026) funded by the Croatian Science Fund. The aim of the project is to prove the hypothesis that what we have at hand is a predominantly subversive attitude on the part of literature towards the phenomenon of crisis and towards systems in crisis. The research done in the first year of the project (2021) shows that of the 126 German-language prose and drama texts included in the corpus, focusing on texts published from 2000 to 2021, 29 deal explicitly with crises in the local community or in the city and 23 with migration crises (cf. Novak et al. 2021, p. 3). The literary works selected for analysis, which offer urban areas as the setting of the narrative, show how, at the expense of the protagonists’/characters’ isolated experience, a shared, global view is illustrated that might indicate literary trends in dealing with contemporary problems in society, such as the attitude towards the ‘other’, the marginalized, or the ‘different’. Paradoxically, at the same time, through the way they subtly address these problematic attitudes, the literary texts become topoi that allow space for criticism. The novel and two plays that are the focus of this research have all been published in German since the year 2000 and are part of the project’s corpus. They have been selected as representative examples of how the urban, civilized, dominant community acts and reacts when it comes into contact with the ‘other’. They encompass both the individual and the collective, tragedy and comedy, but also social satire which addresses many problems of the world we consider to be structured and ordered, revealing that it is in reality a place of complex dynamics of centricity versus provinciality and inclusion versus exclusion. The paper takes a close look at Robert Menasse’s novel Die Hauptstadt (2017), Philipp Löhle’s play Wir sind keine Barbaren! (2015) and Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz’s play Phantom (Ein Spiel) (2015). The transgeneric analysis of the selected literary texts shows how the migration crises in the big cities are not explicitly addressed, but rather pushed to the sides and margins – both literally and figuratively - and overlooked, and thus made even deeper within the system of the narrative (that is, in the narrative of both the prose as well as the drama text). In all three examples, the “we” is often emphasized as dominant, while “the others” are marginalized, both geographically and symbolically, due to this dominance. The migrants/refugees appear and remain on the geographical periphery, while also not even being recognized, and listened to, or else they become condemned to a life in symbolic parallel worlds. The community in all three examples acts globally in the economic and communication-strategic sense, but limits its self-image and the conception of “we” locally, and in doing so emphasizes the meaningfulness of their own tradition, while diminishing the existence of the others.

A True Representation of The Young Generation in Chetan Bhagat's Novel

Chetan Bhagat is one of the most significant author of contemporary Indian English literature. His work frequently presents thematic concerns on modern topics including young aspirations, love, sex, marriage, urban middle class sensibilities, and problems with corruption, politics, and education and its effects on the Indian youth and society. He chose all topics of the youth and their life carefully. Primary, he centers on the present youth. He expounds on their goals and aspirations. Despite the fact that his stories are romantic in nature, the study of all of his stories centers on Indian young generation and its most pressing problems. His stories all feature sensitive young generation who disagree with the social morals that are already in place. The majority of the characters resemble caricatures that represent various flaws or virtues in Indian culture today. He has the ability to persuade the reader of the state of society so that one can easily form an accurate mental picture of modern Indian society and youth. This essay is a genuine attempt to give a complete literary analysis of a few of Chetan Bhagat's selected works of fiction, bearing in mind how his fiction serves as a truthful representation of the young generation.

Literature and the Indian working class: Mridula Koshy in conversation

ABSTRACT In this interview conducted in Delhi on March 20, 2022, Indian author Mridula Koshy discusses the specific circumstances of writing, publishing, and reading in contemporary India. She talks about her determination to engage in a conversation that involves all members of Indian society and explains why, a few years ago, she decided to stop writing fiction and concentrate instead on her work at the free community library she co-founded in Delhi. Referring to her short stories and her 2016 novel Bicycle Dreaming, she discusses her interest in small lives and unexceptional characters. She shares her dissatisfaction with Indian contemporary literature in English that portrays the working class in a way that satisfies the curiosity of middle-class readers but fails to engage with a larger readership. On the other hand, she praises the scope of Indian literature in other languages, especially in Malayalam and Tamil.

Traditional and Contemporary English Literature Teaching Methods in a Lebanese EFL academic context: A quasi-experimental study

Many university instructors face challenges in literature classes. Students get bored of long hours of teacher-centred lectures, so they sign-in to the on-line class but neither participate actively nor interact. They rarely read the assigned literary texts; instead, they resort to open access study guides and summaries available online. The aim of this study is to examine the impact of integrating Traditional and Contemporary Methods of teaching English literature on the students’ critical thinking skills, academic literary analysis, EFL communicative skills, digital literacy and their attitude to value English Literature. A quasi-experimental research is conducted on two sophomore literature classes (n=30) at a Lebanese university. The adopted theoretical framework is based on: the constructivist cognitive apprenticeship, critical thinking skills, literature teaching methods, and digital literacy skills. Data collection instruments employed in this study are: (a) the students’ formative assessment scores pre, mid and post intervention, (b) the perception of the students (post intervention) and (c) the participation level of the students. Research findings reveal that the students’ formative assessment mean scores shifted from M = 61.8 and SD = 9.3 to M=72.4 and SD = 6.89 post intervention; their (post intervention) perceptions were positive, and their participation level markedly improved. Recommendations and implications for further research are discussed.

Intertextuality in contemporary fantastic fiction

The article focuses on the elements of intertextuality in contemporary English literature at the theoretical level and then through literary analysis, and it also clarifies the notion of intertextuality in terms of the process of “Changes and Transformations” at two different levels. At the beginning, there is a description of the characteristics of the concept of intertextuality according to selected sources (F. de Saussure, J. Kristeva, M. Bakhtin, G. Genette, W. Benjamin, F. Jameson, G. Allen). Then the focus is on the examination of one particular intertextual work of a contemporary fantastic literature author, Theodora Goss, who based her work on the tradition of English Gothic and Victorian novels. Such novels exploit works of English classics in literary allusions (M. Shelley, A. C. Doyle, B. Stoker, H. G. Wells, R. L. Stevenson, O. Wilde) and motifs from works of American literature (N. Hawthorne). Eventually, there is an evaluation of the analysed novel, mentioning also the significance of classical literary works in the context of contemporary English prose.

Expérience d’écriture créative, entre lecture critique du roman britannique contemporain et vieilles histoires de famille

Based on an experience of creative writing (the turning into a narrative of family history reconstructed by means of birth registers and other public records), this article shows how academic methodologies facilitated every stage of creative writing. More specifically, the critical reading of contemporary British literature made it possible to adequately problematize key issues and formulate responses to questions that arose during the writing process, and thus to transform the archive into a narrative for readers who, in this particular instance, were family members.This paper tracks the writing process, from the initial questions related to the retrieval of a “life”, in the biographical sense, from meagre archival data, to the type of text that can emerge from this type of research and to considering varied solutions to the problem of the integration of fiction into biography. Creative writing thus appears closely linked to the critical reading of much-loved “classics” which become, as such, pillaged sources of inspiration.

Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature

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‘We lived upon jagged teeth in the dark’: The Housing Estate in Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City and Nikesh Shukla’s

This article examines the representation of the council estate in Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City (2018) and Nikesh Shukla’s Run, Riot (2018) using a geocritical lens. Both novels feature violent and exclusionary spaces where young adults exist in liminal states akin to Agamben’s ‘bare life’. The lack of agency experienced by the characters in these novels is rendered ever more salient through themes of surveillance and hypervisibility. Yet, these novels also subvert representations of the housing estate, by depicting it as a heterogeneous and multi-dimensional site, particularly exemplified through the emancipatory potential offered by rap and grime music. Ultimately, these novels challenge the compartmentalisation of BAME fiction and offer new ways of thinking about the inner city in contemporary British literature.

John Burnside. Ed. by Ben Davies

John Burnside. Ed. by Ben Davies. New York; London: Bloomsbury Academic (Contemporary Critical Perspectives), 2020. 166 pp. $90.00. ISBN 978–1–3500–3697–0. Many critics have voiced the opinion that John Burnside is a key figure among those writers who maintain an ecologically-focused vision throughout their work. Such gestures at canonization have now been given formal weight by Bloomsbury Academic, which dedicated a volume to Burnside in their series ‘Contemporary Critical Perspectives’. The volume spares no effort; editor Ben Davies has recruited some notable literary authors alongside distinguished Burnside scholars to give detailed and compelling scholarly attention to the many facets of his prose and poetry. Citing abundantly from his dreamy yet inch-perfect prose, Peter Childs argues that Burnside expresses his Gnostic vision abstractly via descriptions of physical details such as bodily pain or sensual perception. Also focusing on his metaphysical worldview, Jan Wilm concludes that the awareness of dead spirits or God’s presence is provisional in Burnside’s poetry: the supernatural, for him, is always ‘almost’ perceptible. Wilm claims that since Burnside is interested in the boundaries of existence, it is the indeterminacy of the relationship between humans and other creatures that provides the underlying tone of his poems. Several other aspects of Burnside’s textual world are also investigated in depth: Alexandra Campbell probes the paradox between violence and familiarity, which is a central concern in his prose; Ruth Cain aims to clarify the sociopathic traces of his prose from a Lacanian standpoint; while Julian Wolfreys sets out to interpret his motifs of crossing, continuity and transformation in a subjective essay. Monika Szuba’s informed study calls on Heidegger to shed light on Burnside’s notion of homeliness in a geographical and linguistic sense. Also relying primarily on Heidegger but proceeding from definitions of the pastoral, Tom Bristow’s essay moves heavy philosophical equipment to untangle Burnside’s ecologically-themed poems. David Borthwick tackles the otherworldly and Unheimlich presences in Burnside’s verse. The volume ends with an informal interview conducted with the writer by Ben Davies and a useful, fifteen-page long Further Reading section. This marvellous collection will significantly contribute to our better understanding of John Burnside’s diverse ecological interests: it is required reading for Burnside scholars and strongly recommended to everyone whose research concerns ecological themes in contemporary British and Scottish literature. [https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqac011]

Amphibious Magical Realism? The Shape of Water as Cinematic Trauma Narrative

Amphibious Magical Realism? <i>The Shape of Water</i> as Cinematic Trauma Narrative

SUGGESTED TOPICS FOR THE SYLLABUS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE COURSE IN ELT DEPARTMENTS

Using literature in language teaching as authentic material has many advantages such as developing learners’ intercultural competence, personal involvement, proficiency in the target language, creativity, critical, and analytical thinking, interpreting, speaking and communication skills. Correspondingly, the purposes of this study are to explore how many state universities have the syllabus for English Literature courses on their official websites and to find out the most preferred topics of English Literature courses in ELT programs. As a part of the qualitative data collection, online curriculums of 59 state universities were explored to find the most preferred topics of these courses. Based on the findings of the study, out of 59 universities, only 37 universities’ online syllabi of “English Literature Course I and II” were available. Also, common topics in English Literature courses’ syllabi of 37 universities were listed. Medieval English Literature - The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer, Old English Period - Beowulf, and Elizabethan Era - Shakespeare were among the most preferred topics, while Middle Age period: historic, social, literary events, Contemporary English Literature, 20th-century literature were the least preferred ones. In the conclusion part of the study, some suggestions were presented for syllabi of English Literature courses in ELT departments of universities.