John Lanchester Research Articles

Influence of Historical Events on American Literature of the 21st Century

Purpose: The aim of the study was to assess the influence of historical events on American literature of the 21st century. Materials and Methods: This study adopted a desk methodology. A desk study research design is commonly known as secondary data collection. This is basically collecting data from existing resources preferably because of its low cost advantage as compared to a field research. Our current study looked into already published studies and reports as the data was easily accessed through online journals and libraries. Findings: The terrorist attacks marked a significant turning point, inspiring a wave of literature that grapples with themes of loss, trauma, and the complexities of patriotism. This era saw the rise of novels, memoirs, and poems that explore the personal and collective impact of the event, such as Don DeLillo's "Falling Man" and Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close." Additionally, the economic downturn of 2008 influenced a body of work that critiques capitalism and explores themes of financial instability and inequality, exemplified by novels like John Lanchester's "Capital" and Jess Walter's "The Financial Lives of the Poets." The rise of social movements, such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, has significantly shaped contemporary American literature, prompting a surge in works addressing racial injustice, gender equality, and social activism. Authors like Ta-Nehisi Coates with "Between the World and Me" and Angie Thomas with "The Hate U Give" provide powerful narratives that reflect the ongoing struggle for civil rights and social justice. Implications to Theory, Practice and Policy: Historical materialism, trauma theory and cultural theory may be used to anchor future studies on assessing the influence of historical events on American literature of the 21st century. Encouraging the inclusion of diverse voices and perspectives in literary production and academic studies is essential. Government and private institutions should provide funding and grants specifically aimed at supporting literary works that address significant historical events.

Experience(s) of Decorporation: The Invisibilisation of Care in John Lanchester’s Capital (2012)

Abstract In The Ethics of Care (2006), Virginia Held underlines that care cannot be conceived without recognising our interdependence and responsibility for one another. Despite recent efforts to divide our society between private and public spheres, no such clear delimitation is possible in the ethics of care. Yet, as the Covid-19 pandemic has shown, the neoliberal financialisation of healthcare systems is redefining our ability to look after others. John Lanchester’s ‘crunch lit’ novel Capital (2012) draws attention to what I call “experiences of decorporation”: the vulnerable ageing body and the medical system both become victims of a market-logic which invisibilises the cared for, the carer, and the caring. Taking place on a single street in London, the metonymic construction of the novel calls for an analysis of how the illness and death of Petunia Howe, the oldest resident on Pepys Road, is symptomatic of the ethical effacement of the body politic under the clout of neoliberal politics.

A Posthuman Approach to BrexLit and Bordering Practices through an Analysis of John Lanchester’s The Wall

Kristen Sandrock (2020) connects John Lanchester’s 2019 Brexit novel The Wall with what she refers to as ‘British border epistemologies’; that is, a radical process of re-bordering due to global warming and its impact on human mobility. The literary phenomenon that is now referred to as ‘BrexLit’ bears witness to the way in which borders and the fear to the other seem to impinge on contemporary British fiction. BrexLit is framed by an increasing global interest in exploring interdisciplinary bordering practices. Primarily, BrexLit manifests through realist and/or speculative long fiction, although there are numerous short stories and poetry that deal with this seismic political event. This article proposes to focus on different samples of speculative long fiction born from Brexit before highlighting Lanchester’s The Wall. Posthuman studies offer a convenient theoretical framework with which to approach this specific text where the British border, refugees and the fear of the other are the drivers of the plot. Thus, this contribution will explore alien configurations of refugees in contemporary British speculative fiction and the way in which these texts question Brexit rhetoric in an eye-opening and thought-provoking way, assisting readers to understand the context and consequences of such a profound political event.

“Posthuman Intersections in BrexLit: Representing Migration in Contemporary British Fiction”

ABSTRACT The United Kingdom European Union membership or, in common parlance, Brexit referendum, held in the United Kingdom on 23rd June 2016, was an unprecedented event in European politics. This article analyses a literary corpus of long fiction, known as BrexLit, which have all drawn inspiration from this poll and its subsequent consequences for British society. Novels such as Ali Smith’s Autumn (2017), Anthony Cartwright’s The Cut (2017), Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017), Jonathan Coe’s Middle England (2018), John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019) or Ian McEwan’s The Cockroach (2019), and others, will be examined through the lens of Posthuman Studies to establish the numerous intersections that can be identified within these texts’ realist and speculative worldviews. BrexLit questions traditional norms, such as the Humanist conception of the white man being the center of the universe, as well as it provides representation for migratory movements. In fact, migratory and refuge issues will form the centerpiece of this study as the majority of these novels challenge the abundant political discourses against the “Other” that have flourished before, during and after the Brexit campaign.

The Water is Rising, Families are Drowning: An Ecocritical Reading of The Wall by John Lanchaster

Written in a plain and unsophisticated style like numerous other popular novels, the Wall by John Lanchester deals with a series of contemporary global issues including climate change, rising totalitarianism and protracted refugee crisis. Set in a dystopian future, but conscious of the contemporary problems afflicting humanity and environment, the Wall also presents in an interrogant tone scenes of empathy toward refugees or “the Others”. In this essay, referring to the postulations raised in the field of ecocriticism, but particularly to understanding of environmentalism in apocalyptic, postapocalyptic, and dystopian senses, I will attempt to analyze how rising environmental crises and concerns shape the family structure of modern people, and the relationships between children and parents. Based on problematic family images drawn in the Wall, I propose that the rise of environmental disasters has disruptive and destructive effects on traditional family (nuclear family) structure regardless of geographical location, family bonds and intrafamilial relationships, which makes people more vulnerable to external threats in so far as they are left emotionally and mentally, if not physically, debilitated in a devastated environment.

Introduction

This issue of Études britanniques contemporaines emanates from contributions to a workshop of the Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaines (SEAC) at the 2022 conference of the Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur in Clermont-Ferrand. The conference revolved around the notions of faults and fault lines and gave contributors the opportunity to probe the polysemic dimensions of these concepts in 20th and 21st British literature and culture. Starting from the concrete meaning of faults and fault lines in geology, articles embrace broader contexts in which splits, cracks, ruptures and rifts can lead to long-lasting divisions but may also pave the way for new explorations. In addition to contributions engaging with the notions of faults and fault lines, this issue includes an essay on John Lanchester’s Capital (2012) and two reviews of books on modernism and the recycling of Virginia Woolf in contemporary art and literature.

A Street-Level View of the World-City: John Lanchester’s London in Capital (2012)

In his choral novel Capital (2012), John Lanchester charts the intersecting trajectories of the residents of Pepys Road, an ordinary-looking street of South London, even as the 2008 financial crisis hits. More than the spectacular crumbling of global finance, this realist novel focuses on the property boom which heralded it. This paper contends that this street-level view of one of the centres of the world-system, which contrasts with dystopian, gothic and apocalyptic literary imaginations of London, enables the author to encode the most insidious effects of global capitalism on urban life, and the ways in which real estate speculation fundamentally disrupts the social fabric of the city. This downscaled narrative of contemporary London, which foregrounds houses as central characters, thus does not emphasise the collective ‘production of locality’ (Appadurai) but the divorce of space from affect and the disappearance of the neighbourhood as a common space, thus suggesting the splintering of London into ‘fortified fragments’ (Harvey), in other words, the suburbanisation of the world-city.

Class in John Lanchester’s Fiction

Class in John Lanchester’s Fiction

Dissolution of Cultural Diversity, Morality and Immigrants’ Dreams in John Lanchester’s Capital

Immigrants from colonised countries live in many European countries, including Portugal, England, Germany and France. The prime reason for their immigration is to make money. Many post-colonial novels reflect the terrible condition of the immigrants in the world. In general, they highlight the ruin of multi-culturalism, morality and kindness in the prevailing society. The European countries focus on the fundamental needs and their expectations. They fail to protect the young immigrants and their aims. John Lanchester’s Capital boastfully describes the impact of the inevitable immigration of Asians and Africans to London. It is observed from the study that some immigrants are attracted by the life of aristocratic Londoners. This influences them to involve in criminal and immoral activities to live a luxurious life. As a result, London becomes a place of immorality. The dreams and cultures of the immigrants are entirely dissolute. On the one hand, the immigrants are considered to be slaves and criminals and on the other hand, they are exploited in sports, education and business contexts. This article brings out the condition of the immigrants in Europe with special reference to John Lanchester’s Capital through a qualitative study.

Representation of the Postcolonial Migrants’ Multi-Religious Cultures and the Fantasy of Christianity in John Lanchester’s Capital

Literary writings have broadened that the world broaches the religious and cultural discrimination between the imperialist countries and the colonized immigrants. John Lanchester spreads over the conflicts of the multi-religious culture of migrants and the pride of the Christmas festival in European countries in his novel, Capital (2012). The Christian countries have defeated the migrants by showing pretentious prevailing city life in London. Unfortunately, some migrating laborers are illiterate to encounter them all. He forces migrants not to convert themselves from one religion to another for getting jobs. He also emancipates his presser to look after the life of migrating people in European countries. He then indirectly talks about the three religions: Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. He proves that London is a place for Christianity, which is reflected in Christmas decorations. This novel elongates many themes related to the social and economic exploitation of poor migrants at Pepys Road in London.

JOHN LANCHESTER’IN THE WALL ROMANINDA İNSAN İSTİSNACILIĞI, KIRILGANLIK VE TEKDÜZEN EKONOMİSİ

John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019) presents a dystopic world where climate change in the form of extreme rising sea levels has caused the majority of the landmasses to be inundated and millions of people to lose their homes, transforming them into environmentally displaced people who try to survive in the open seas. In the novel, miraculously affected by climate change only in a limited way, Britain builds a ten-thousand-kilometer-long wall that circumscribes all its borders to keep not only the water out but also the environmentally displaced others. Given this double function of the wall, this article aims to discuss this image of the wall, first, as a reflection of human exceptionalism which gives off the false impression that even a climate disaster at that scale is still somehow tractable. Second, it further argues that the wall acts as a catalyst for perpetuating an economy of sameness or self-identity that deliberately ignores and increases the vulnerability and precarity of others by creating an impassable divide between insiders (i.e. those inside the wall) and outsiders (i.e. the environmentally displaced people)—a divide that not only maximizes the precarity of the latter group but also casts their lives as disposable.

Toward a Realism of the World-System: John Lanchester’sCapitaland the Global City

AbstractThis essay explores how John Lanchester’s Capital adapts classical realism to represent the contemporary global city; it pays particular attention to how London’s position in the world-system disrupts Lukácsian totality. Because the novel attends to the complexity and extensiveness of the world-system, it depicts the city not as a representative totality but as embedded in the global circuits of capital, shaped by the influences of inward migration and global finance. In this the novel has affinities with many fictions of the global periphery, for instance portraying the city as at once socially fragmented and structurally connected. Furthermore, the novel departs from classical realism in its closure; though the 2008 financial crisis is omitted from the novel, it overshadows the entire plot, and its absence emphasizes the lack of finality in the story of this phase of capitalism itself. In demonstrating the temporal and spatial unknowability of contemporary capital, Lanchester’s novel both affirms the capacity of realism to trace deep systemic connections and reveals the fragility of its construction of a social totality, positing a realism attendant to its own perspectival limits within the world-system.

Surrender: The Call of the American West by Joanna Pocock

Reviewed by: Surrender: The Call of the American West by Joanna Pocock O. Alan Weltzien, emeritus Joanna Pocock, Surrender: The Call of the American West. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2019. 373 pp. Paper, $22.95 CAN; e-book, $18.95 CAN. Londoner Joanna Pocock’s journalistic memoir joins an increasingly rich genre of trans-Atlantic interpretations of whatever the American West is becoming in the early twenty-first century. Pocock announces straightaway, “The mid-life crisis package I was handed came in a box marked with one simple word: Montana” (2). Pocock, her husband Jason, and young daughter Eve quit the city and spent two years (2014–16) residing in Missoula. She confesses to nomadism though she’s called London home for a quarter century, and during this period (as well as at least one subsequent trip), she ranges into central Oregon and Washington backcountry, following a series of “rewilders.” Her love and longing for Big Sky Country feels as palpable as her growing disillusionment with London. Pocock’s voice joins an old international chorus, entranced by the monumentality of western [End Page 91] American landscapes: “The vastness, the inscrutability of so much space, performs an act of initiation. It does things to you that cannot be undone” (364). Hers is a Missoula-centric version of Montana, and her version of the American West tracks both familiar and obscure topics. She and her family witness wolves in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley, and she spends time with the Buffalo Field Campaign (and “Buffalo Bridge Collective”) outside Gardner, Montana. The annual bison culling and annual conflict between the stockgrower-led state forces and the federal agencies is old news. She reviews the Tintina Corporation’s proposed copper mine (the “Black Butte Project”) near Montana’s beloved Smith River as well as restoration efforts by Trout Unlimited upstream and downstream from Missoula. Oddly, Pocock doesn’t cover the removal of the Milltown Union Dam (2008) and subsequent Clark Fork River restoration projects. Farther afield, she glances at North Dakota’s Standing Rock protests (342–26) and the notorious Rajneesh community near Antelope, Oregon, in the early 1980s (309–11). Pocock unduly focuses upon certain fringe groups who might be lumped under the umbrella notion of survivalists. But most of her survivalists are not white supremacist groups whose loud online noise masks their tiny numbers: the sort of fringes tracked by organizations such as the Montana Human Rights Network. The 3 Percenters, or “Threepers,” fall under this category, and her closing scene of the Boundary County (Idaho) Fair highlights the booths of the NRA, tragically mainstream, as well as the “Oath Keepers” (359–62). It’s no surprise that Pocock surveys the annual Rainbow Gathering. She’s much more intrigued by a few rewilders who have adopted, in sundry ways, a hunter-gatherer ethos and not only live off the grid but forage for their “Paleo diet.” She profiles, for example, Peter Michael Brown, part of “Rewild Portland,” who leads a basket weaving workshop, and spends much more time with Finisia Medrano, a sixty-one-year-old rewilder who, over years and decades, lives “on the hoop.” It’s hard to see Medrano, a caustic, transgendered stoner specializing in digging biscuit root and planting seeds of edible wild plants, as the positive role model she becomes for Pocock. Despite Pocock’s admiring reference to [End Page 92] John Lanchester’s article about hunter gatherers (The New Yorker, 18 Sept. 2017), Medrano and her ilk lack the personal appeal let alone the audience Euell Gibbons commanded two generations ago. Lanchester’s claim— “‘It turns out that hunting and gathering is a good way to live. . . . The lives of most of our progenitors were better than we think’”— seems dubious at best. Pocock overstates the case when she claims, “So many of these fringe outliers are now having their cries taken up by academics and writers.” Here’s the issue, as she concedes: “We can’t all live as hunter-gatherers” (295). No kidding. Nor would most folks willingly adopt the tribal style “fringe outliers” and “hunter-gatherers” depend upon. That said, there is much to admire about widely disseminated knowledge of edible plants— what...

Narratives of Disposability in Contemporary British Fiction: Monica Ali's In the Kitchen and John Lanchester's Capital

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to analyse Monica Ali's In the Kitchen (2009) and John Lanchester's Capital (2012). I draw on the notion of disposability (Evans and Giroux, Standing, and Bauman) to delve into the concepts of neoliberal subjectivity and exclusion for the analysis of the characters that in the novels embody subjectivities shaped by the logic of finance (economic migrants or asylum seekers). I argue that both works narrate different personifications of disposability resulting from neoliberal violence. In In the Kitchen and Capital, both Ali and Lanchester map a dark cartography of neoliberal British society. Both novels picture a society that is either indifferent to the violence provoked by neoliberalism, or unable to fight it back; the two works map a journey that slides from an apparently multicultural and opulent society down into a kind of dantesque social Inferno.

The Great Displacement: Reading Migration Fiction at the End of the World

This paper examines how contemporary works of fiction and nonfiction reflect on anticipated cases of climate dislocation. Building on existing research about migrant agency, climate fiction, and human rights, it traces the contours of climate migration discourse before analyzing how three twenty-first-century novels enable us to reimagine the “great displacement” beyond simplistic militarized and humanitarian frames. Zooming in on stories by Mohsin Hamid, John Lanchester, and Margaret Drabble that envision hypothetical calamities while responding to present-day refugee “crises”, this paper explains how these texts interrogate apocalyptic narratives by demilitarizing borderscapes, exploring survivalist mindsets, and interrogating shallow appeals to empathy.

Border Temporalities, Climate Mobility, and Shakespeare in John Lanchester's <em>The Wall</em>

Border Temporalities, Climate Mobility, and Shakespeare in John Lanchester's <em>The Wall</em>

John Lanchester’s Capital: financial risk and its counterpoints

ABSTRACTJohn Lanchester’s Capital (2012) reads London as a space in which risk and chance are complexly entangled – for ‘native’ Londoners as well as people who come to it from all parts of the world and for various reasons: as businessmen, economic migrants, political refugees or talent from the Global South. Capital comes across as a ‘social novel’ in the nineteenth-century sense: as a panorama of social types and narrative trajectories. It is precisely this conventional mode of presentation (and its tradition of social critique) that enables Lanchester’s novel to trace what risk, with both its positive and negative implications, means for the various characters whose lives before and after the 2008 crash it follows. Capital thus exposes reckless capitalism but also explores many other meanings that risk and risk-taking can have in globalised urban settings of the twenty-first century. It personalises and humanises ‘risk’, and it demands an ethical positioning of the readers as it juxtaposes the irresponsible risk-taking of the finance world with the risk-taking and resilience of individual people who find themselves in different forms of precarious life.

John Lanchester's <em>Capital:</em> A Dickensian Examination of the Condition of England

John Lanchester's <em>Capital:</em> A Dickensian Examination of the Condition of England

Editor's Introduction: Modernist Modes of Resistance

Editor’s Introduction: Modernist Modes of Resistance Paula Marantz Cohen How can writers use the tools of their cultural inheritance to shed light on the oppressive aspects of their nation’s ideology or on related practices of other societies or time periods? The first four essays in this issue deal with artists seeking to resist or escape nationalist ideologies through modernist techniques. Ariela Freedman argues that Charlotte Salomon’s iconoclastic image-text combinations were inspired by the 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition in Germany and that these composite expressions became her mode of resisting, both politically and therapeutically, the fascist regime that sought to oppress her. Keri Walsh’s essay deals with how Elizabeth Bowen exploited the spatial and temporal features of Futurism in her fiction, separating these from the movement’s fascist-leaning ideology and, in the process, drawing attention to victims of fascism. Aleksandar Stević refutes twenty years of scholarship that concentrated on James Joyce’s linguistic nationalism and ethnic essentialism, taking us back to an earlier appreciation of Joyce’s cosmopolitanism and aestheticism. Vaughn Anderson looks at the way John Cage was able to deploy an aesthetic of indeterminacy as a model for non-intervention in South American policy during the Cold War. The next group of essays makes connections across communities or time periods. Zoë Roth discusses how the American author John Littell in his French novel, The Kindly Ones, uses image as well as text to create links between World World II, the Algerian War, the Vietnam War, and 9/11. J. Russell Perkin addresses John Lanchester’s 2012 Capital, which draws on earlier work by “condition of England novelists,” most notably Charles Dickens, to show connections and divergences from contemporary England. Raphaël Lambert’s essay on Barry Unsworth’s novel, Sacred Hunger, traces the creation and the dissolution of an eighteenth-century mixed-race utopian community, discussing the complex factors needed for a community to remain coherent and unified over time. The final essay in the issue, by Laura R. Fisher, reads James Baldwin’s Another Country as an experiment in language that illuminates social conditions and makes language the site of protest from the 1960s into the present. Rounding out the issue are three book reviews on themes related to the essays. Steve Ellis’s British Writers and the Approach of World War II deals with the way [End Page 1] canonical nineteenth-century and modernist authors, in their mix of skepticism and support for liberalism, can teach contemporary readers to think in nuanced ways about political issues. Amanda Anderson’s Bleak Liberalism deals with the anxiety experienced by major modernist writers about their commitment to liberalism at the beginning of World War II. Bridget T. Chalk’s Modernism and Mobility: The Passport and Cosmopolitan Experience addresses the constraints and related circumventions that came into being as a result of “the narrow juridical narrative of individual identity” associated with the advent of the passport. [End Page 2] Copyright © 2017 The Trustees of Indiana University

Clarissa Dalloway’s itinerary: narrative identity across texts

This article sets out to examine the migration of Virginia Woolf’s character Clarissa Dalloway from its original score (The Voyage Out) to other autographic (the short story “Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street” and the novel Mrs Dalloway) and allographic (Robin Lippincott’s Mr Dalloway and John Lanchester’s Mr Phillips) texts. The itinerary selected here traces her evolution from the very beginning of the twentieth century, when she is a rather conventional character, to a modernist, then post-modernist and neo-modernist character at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This itinerary reflects the authors’ evolving literary theories on character representation and construction of fictional worlds. By following Clarissa Dalloway’s textual itinerary, this article provides insights into her narrative identities, that is to say the way the different authors perpetuate the original character’s diagnostic properties and adapt them to new diegetic environments. Clarissa Dalloway migrates across texts, mutating and adjusting to new socio-cultural concerns and aesthetic contexts.