The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature
Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
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Title: The Wiley Blackwell companion to contemporary British and Irish literature / principal editor Richard Bradford ; associate editors Madelena Gonzalez, Stephen Butler, James Ward, Kevin De Ornellas.
Other titles: Companion to contemporary British and Irish literature
Description: First edition. | Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, 2021– | Series: Wiley-Blackwell encyclopedia of literature | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019053470 (print) | LCCN 2019053471 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118902301 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119653066 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119652649 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: English literature–21st century–History and criticism. | English literature–Irish authors–History and criticism.
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Contributors Notes of Vol. I
Alex Alonso is an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. After completing his Ph.D. thesis at the University of York, he began a research fellowship at Trinity in 2019. His first monograph, Transatlantic Formations: Paul Muldoon in America , is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2020. My current project, ‘Writing on Air: Irish Writers and the Radio, 1966‐1986’, considers radio’s complex relationship with modern Irish writing, and examines the radio studio itself as space for creative experiment, rivalry, and collaboration between artists on and off the air. Since 2018, he has been the annual reviewer of ‘British Poetry Post‐1950’ for The Year’s Work in English Studies
Elisabeth Angel‐Perez is Professor of Contemporary British Literature and Drama at Sorbonne University in Paris. She has published extensively on modern and contemporary theatre and more particularly on theatre and trauma from Beckett to Sarah Kane, on voice and spectropoetics of the contemporary stage (Harold Pinter, Howard Barker, Edward Bond, Martin Crimp, Caryl Churchill, Jez Butterworth, debbie tucker green) or on playful tragedy (Churchill, Nick Gill, Stoppard). She is currently working on a book on the theatre of obliteration. Elisabeth is also a translator (Howard Barker, Martin Crimp, Caryl Churchill, Nick Gill, David Harrower, Lucy Kirkwood, Nick Payne, among others).
Christine Berberich holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of York, and is Reader in Literature at the University of Portsmouth, where she teaches twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century literature. Her research specialism is on English national identity on the one hand, and on Holocaust literatures, in particular perpetrator writing, on the other. She is author of The Image of the English Gentleman
in Twentieth‐Century Literature: Englishness & Nostalgia (2007); editor of The Bloomsbury Introduction to Popular Fiction (2014) and co‐editor of These Englands: Conversations on National Identity (2011), Land & Identity: Theory, Memory, Practice (2012) and Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art and Everyday Life (2015); as well as author of articles and chapters on authors as diverse as W.G. Sebald, Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes, Rachel Seiffert, Ian Fleming‚ and Linda Grant.
Peter Billingham, who sadly passed away in January 2020, was Professor of Modern Drama at the University of Winchester. His many publications include Edward Bond: A Critical Study (2014), Theatres of Conscience, 1939‐53 (2002), and Sensing the City through Television (2000). Alongside his work as a critic, he wrote and produced a number of acclaimed plays.
Richard Bradford is Research Professor in English at Ulster University. He has held academic posts in Oxford, the University of Wales‚ and Trinity College, Dublin. Among his thirty‐two acclaimed books is The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction. He has also published eight well‐reviewed literary biographies with trade presses, including lives of Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Alan Sillitoe, Martin Amis, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, John Milton and, forthcoming, Patricia Highsmith. He is Visiting Professor at Avignon University.
Laura J Burkinshaw is a Ph.D. researcher at the University of Hull and Sheffield Hallam University. She is funded by the North of England Consortium for Arts and Humanities. She gained the undergraduate degree in English Literature and History from the University of Hull and her master’s degree from the University of Warwick. Her research examines social and cultural history in the maritime world, focusing on British
popular culture and the Royal Navy. She specializes in navalism and nationalism in inter‐war Britain, specifically the interplay between British society, Britishness‚ and the sea. The following is her first publication: Burkinshaw, L. 2019. ‘Churchill’s Thin Grey Line: British Merchant Ships at War 1939–1945’. International Journal of Maritime History 31 (4), pp. 929–930.
Stephen Butler is from Northern Ireland where he teaches Contemporary Fiction at the University of Ulster, having been a full‐time lecture in the School of English and History for six years after a number of years teaching in Poland. He has published various articles on contemporary fiction and poetry, both on specific authors such as John Banville and Paul Muldoon, as well as more broadly on crime and genre fiction.
Sean Carney is an Associate Professor of Drama and Theatre in the Department of English at McGill University. His areas of interest include contemporary British theatre. His publications include Brecht and Theatre: Dialectics and Contemporary Aesthetics and The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary English Tragedy, and essays on Edward Bond, Howard Brenton, David Edgar‚ and Sarah Kane.
Kathleen Costello‐Sullivan is a Professor of Modern Irish Literature and the former Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Le Moyne College. She teaches courses in nineteenth–twenty‐first century English and Irish literature, poetry, and postcolonial literature. She holds a B.A. in English and Spanish from Rutgers University–New Brunswick, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English/Irish Studies from Boston College (2004). She is the author of Mother/ Country: Politics of the Personal in the Fiction of Colm Tóibín and the editor of critical editions of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla with Syracuse University Press and Norah Hoult’s Poor Women! with Anthem Press. Her most recent monograph, Trauma and Recovery in the Twenty‐First‐Century Irish Novel, was published by Syracuse University Press in 2018. Kate is the current President of the American Conference for Irish studies – the largest academic Irish organization in the world – and has served since summer 2018 as the first female series editor of the Syracuse University Press Irish line, the oldest line of its
kind in North America. She is currently researching representations of the nurturing parental body in Irish literature for her next book.
Brian Diemert is a Professor of English at Brescia University College (affiliated with Western University). Among the course he teaches are Twentieth‐Century and Beyond British and Irish Literature, American Literature, and the History of Literary Criticism and Theory. He is the author of Graham Greene’s Thrillers and the 1930s (McGill‐Queens, 1996) and of the forthcoming Understanding Kate Atkinson (University of South Carolina Press). He has published essays on Ian McEwan, Graham Greene, Ian Rankin, and others. He has also published essays on detective fiction, popular music, and Cold War literature.
Borbálala Faragó is a Lecturer at Central European University, where she previously held a Marie Curie Intra‐European Fellowship. She holds a Ph.D. from University College Dublin, and her research interests include literature and cultural studies, poetry, literary theory, gender, ecocriticism‚ and discourses of migration and transnationalism. She is the author of a monograph on the work of Medbh McGuckian (Medbh McGuckian, Bucknell and Cork University Press, 2014), a number of articles on contemporary Irish poetry, and is also co‐editor of a collection of essays entitled Facing the Other: Interdisciplinary Studies on Race, Gender and Social Justice in Ireland (with M. Sullivan, 2008), an anthology of Irish immigrant poetry entitled Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland published by Dedalus Press (with Eva Bourke, 2010), Animals in Irish Literature (with K. Kirkpatrick, 2015) by Palgrave Press, and Times of Mobility: Transnational Literature and Gender in Translation (with J. Lukic and S. Forrester, 2020) by CEU Press.
Heather Fielding is Director of the University Honors Program and Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin‐Eau Claire. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Brown University and taught in Ukraine for a year as a Fulbright scholar. Her work on modern and contemporary fiction has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Studies in the Novel, Journal of Modern Literature, Modern Language Quarterly,
and Feminist Modernist Studies, and she is the author of Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Jean‐Michel Ganteau is Professor of Contemporary British Literature at the University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 and a member of the Academia Europaea. He is the editor of the journal Études britanniques contemporaines. He is the author of three monographs: David Lodge: le choix de l’éloquence (2001), Peter Ackroyd et la musique du passé (2008), and The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Literature (2015). He is also the editor, with Christine Reynier, of four volumes of essays: Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth‐Century British Literature (Publications Montpellier 3, 2005), Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth‐Century British Arts (Presses Universitaires de la Méditerrannée, 2007), Autonomy and Commitment in Twentieth‐Century British Literature (PULM, 2010), and Autonomy and Commitment in Twentieth‐Century British Arts (PULM, 2011). He has also co‐edited, with Susana Onega, The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction since the 1960s (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary Narrative in English (Rodopi, 2011), Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature (Routledge, 2012), Contemporary Trauma Narratives: Liminality and the Ethics of Form (Routledge, 2014), Victimhood and Vulnerability in 21st Century Fiction (Routledge, 2017), and Transcending the Postmodern: The Singular Response of Literature to the Transmodern Paradigm (Routledge, 2020). He has published extensively on contemporary British fiction. With a special interest in the ethics of affects trauma criticism and theory, and the ethics of vulnerability, in France and abroad (other European countries, the United States), as chapters in edited volumes or in such journals as Miscelánea, Anglia, Symbolism, The Cambridge Quarterly, and so on.
Vanessa Guignery is Professor of Contemporary English and Postcolonial Literature at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. She was an invited Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in 2011. Her research focuses more specifically on the poetics of voice and silence in contemporary
literature. She published several books and essays on the work of Julian Barnes, including The Fiction of Julian Barnes (2006); Conversations with Julian Barnes (2009), co‐edited with Ryan Roberts; and Julian Barnes from the Margins (2020). She is the author of monographs on Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (2012), B.S. Johnson (2009), and Jonathan Coe (2015). She has edited several books on contemporary British and postcolonial literature, including a collection of interviews, Novelists in the New Millennium (2012), and The B.S. Johnson–Zulfikar Ghose Correspondence (2015).
Adam Hanna is a Lecturer in Irish Literature in the School of English and Digital Humanities at University College Cork. Before this, he taught in the English departments of Trinity College Dublin, the University of Bristol‚ and the University of Aberdeen. He has also trained and practised as a solicitor. His chief area of interest is modern Irish poetry, and his major research projects to date are on law and literature and space and place. He is the author of Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space (Palgrave, 2015), and his second monograph, Poetic Justice: Poetry, Politics and the Law in Modern Ireland, is under contract with Syracuse University Press. He is the co‐editor of two forthcoming edited collections: Architectural Space and the Imagination: Houses in Literature and Art from Classical to Contemporary (with Jane Griffiths, forthcoming with Palgrave) and Law and Literature: The Irish Case (with Eugene McNulty, forthcoming with Liverpool University Press).
Dominic Head is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Nottingham, where he served as Head of School, 2007–2010. He is the author of The Modernist Short Story (Cambridge University Press, 1992); Nadine Gordimer (Cambridge University Press, 1994); J. M. Coetzee (Cambridge University Press, 1997); The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950‐2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2002); Ian McEwan (Manchester University Press, 2007); The State of the Novel (Blackwell, 2008); The Cambridge Introduction to J. M. Coetzee (Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Modernity and the English Rural Novel (Cambridge University Press: 2017). Also, he is the editor of The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, third
edition (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and The Cambridge History of the English Short Story (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Alisa Hemphill is completing a Ph.D. at Ulster University, where she teaches a range of English Literature modules. Current research projects focus on the cultural and literary representations of animals, early modern literature, and ecocriticism.
Keith Hopper teaches Literature, Film Studies, and Digital Humanities for Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education. He is the author of Flann O’Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post‐modernist (revised edition, 2009); general editor of the twelve‐volume Ireland into Film series (2001–2007); and co‐editor (with Neil Murphy) of Flann O’Brien: Centenary Essays (2011) and The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien (2013). He also co‐edited (with Neil Murphy) a series of four books by and about Dermot Healy: The Collected Short Stories and an edited reprint of Healy’s debut novel Fighting with Shadows appeared in 2015; The Collected Plays and Writing the Sky: Observations and Essays on Dermot Healy were published in 2016. Keith is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, and is currently completing a book on poetry and the sense of place in the digital age.
Andrew James holds a doctorate in English literature from Ulster University and is a Professor in English Language and Literature at Meiji University’s School of Commerce in Tokyo. His monograph Kingsley Amis: Antimodels and the Audience was published in 2013. The monograph reflects his interest in the collation of text and biography with manuscript revisions. When he is not happily submerged beneath musty first drafts in archives, he can be found researching wine language. Currently he is at work on a metafictional biography of Graham Greene.
Vanasay Khamphommala (dramaturg and performer) trained at the École normale supérieure in Paris and received their Ph.D. at University Paris‐Sorbonne with their dissertation Specters of Shakespeare in the work of Howard Barker, published by the Presse de l’Université Paris‐Sorbonne. They published articles, among
others in Shakespeare Survey and Études anglaises They translate Shakespeare, Howard Barker, Alistair McDowall, and Anne Carson both for publication and production. They now work as a dramaturg and performer (Venus and Adonis, L’Invocation à la muse, Orphée aphone, Monuments hystériques). Their texts for the stage are published by Éditions Théâtrales.
Michal Lachman is a Lecturer in English and Irish Drama at the Department of English Drama, Theatre and Film, University of Lodz. His research interests include the history of twentieth‐century British and Irish drama, theatre, literary theory‚ and translation. He has published on Brian Friel, Martin McDonagh, Marina Carr, Enda Walsh and Frank McGuinness, Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill. His book Razor’s Edge: British and Irish Drama of the 1990s was published in 2007. In 2018 he published Performing Character in Contemporary Irish Drama: Between Art and Society (Palgrave). He has also translated Christina Reid’s Belle of the Belfast City, Billy Roche’s A Handful of Stars, Frank McGuinness’e Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme and Innocence as well as a number of academic and critical articles for literary and theatrical journals. His translations of Eli Rozik’s Roots of Theatre as well as William Hogarth’s essay The Analysis of Beauty were published in 2011.
Daniel Lea is Professor of Contemporary Literature at Oxford Brookes University. He completed his doctorate at Royal Holloway College, University of London and has worked at a number of universities in the United Kingdom. His main areas of specialization are the contemporary British novel, particularly writing of the twenty‐first century; literature and medicine; and the intersection between literature and sociology. He has published widely on post‐1945 literature and is the author of Graham Swift (2005), Twenty‐First Century British Fiction: Contemporary British Voices (2016), and most recently co‐editor of The Male Body in Medicine and Literature (2018). He is currently writing a book on representations of the authentic in contemporary literature for Edinburgh University Press.
Graham MacPhee is Professor of English at West Chester University. He is the author of Postwar
British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh University Press, 2011) and The Architecture of the Visible (Bloomsbury, 2002), and co‐editor with Prem Poddar of Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective (Berghahn, 2007). He co‐edited a special issue of the journal College Literature with Angela Naimou on “The Banalization of War” (2016) and edited another on “Arendt, Politics, and Culture” (2011).
Dorothy McMillan is Honorary Research Fellow of the University of Glasgow‚ where she taught before her retiral. She has spoken, reviewed‚ and published variously in English and Scottish Literature. She is joint editor with Richard Cronin of Emma in the Cambridge edition of Jane Austen’s works and of Robert Browning the 21st‐Century Oxford Authors series. She is joint editor with Douglas Gifford of A History of Scottish Women’s Writing and with Michel Byrne of Modern Scottish Women Poets. She was the first female President of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies.
Laurent Mellet is a Professor of British literature and film studies at the University Toulouse Jean Jaurès. His research fields are modernist and contemporary British fiction, film and TV studies‚ and adaptation. His work focuses on the ethics of form and partakes of a political criticism of aesthetics. He is the co‐author with Shannon Wells‐Lassagne of Étudier l’adaptation filmique. Cinéma anglais ‐ cinéma américain (PUR, 2010), the author of L’Œil et la voix dans les romans de E. M. Forster et leur adaptation cinématographique (PULM, 2012), of Jonathan Coe. Les politiques de l’intime (PUPS, 2015), of Atonement (Ian McEwan, Joe Wright): ‘The attempt was all’ (Belin, 2017), and the co‐author with Catherine Lanone of Howards End (E. M. Forster, J. Ivory): Beyond Heritage (Belin, 2019). He is the co‐editor with Sophie Aymes of In and Out. Eccentricity in Britain (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) and with Elsa Cavalié of Only Connect: E. M. Forster’s Legacies in British Fiction (Peter Lang, 2017).
Emily Taylor Merriman works in the Writing Center at Amherst College, where she is a Writing Associate and the Advisor for Multilingual Students. She earned her M.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) and her Ph.D. in Religion and Literature
at Boston University. Her published work, specializing in religion and verse form in modern poetry, includes essays on Adrienne Rich, Geoffrey Hill, William Blake, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Thomas Hardy, and Gerard M. Hopkins. Her previous work on Linton Kwesi Johnson includes the essay ‘“Wi naw tek noh more a dem oppreshan”: Linton Kwesi Johnson’s resistant vision’ (2012). Together with Adrian Grafe, she co‐edited Intimate Exposure: Essays on the Public‐Private Divide in British Poetry Since 1950 (2010). Also with Adrian Grafe, Emily Merriman is a book review editor for the Hopkins Quarterly. She earned her M.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) and her Ph.D. in Religion and Literature at Boston University, where she studied with Geoffrey Hill in 1995–1996 and again in the early 2000s.
Laurenz Volkmann, Dr. phil., is Full Professor of Teaching English as a Foreign Language at Friedrich‐Schiller‐University Jena. He has published widely on literature, culture‚ and media studies, from Shakespeare to gender studies to intercultural learning. Major publications are Homo oeconomicus (a study on literature and economics, 2002), The Global Village: Progress or Disaster (2007) and the standard textbook Teaching English (2015).
Anja Müller‐Wood is Professor of English Literature and Culture at Johannes Gutenberg‐University Mainz, which she joined after studying and working at the universities of Marburg and Trier. The author of Angela Carter: Identity Constructed/Deconstructed (1997) and The Theatre of Civilized Excess: New Perspectives on Jacobean Tragedy (2007), she has published extensively on early modern and twentieth‐century British literature and culture. She has also edited and co‐edited essay collections on the powers of narration, the interrelations of literary texts and culture‚ and on teaching contemporary British fiction. She is also co‐editor of the open access International Journal of Literary Linguistics. In her current research‚ she is interested in the cognition of audience reception and in applying linguistic methodology to the study of literary texts.
Neil Murphy is Professor of English Literature in the School of Humanities, NTU Singapore. He is the author of Irish Fiction and Postmodern Doubt
(2004) and editor of Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form (2010). He co‐edited (with Keith Hopper) a special Flann O’Brien centenary issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction (2011) and The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien (2013), and a four‐book series related to the work of Dermot Healy, all with Dalkey Archive Press, United States, including, Writing the Sky: Observations and Essays on Dermot Healy (2016). His book, John Banville, was published by Bucknell University Press in 2018 and his co‐edited (with Michelle Wang and Daniel Jernigan) Routledge Companion to Literature and Death will be published in 2020. He is currently working on a book on contemporary fiction and art.
Joseph H. O’Mealy, Ph.D. (Stanford University), is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His areas of research and teaching include Victorian literature, contemporary drama, and twentieth‐century British and American literature. He is the author of Alan Bennett: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 2001), as well as essays on Dickens, Conrad, Margaret Oliphant, Muriel Spark, and Alan Bennett.
Susana Onega is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Zaragoza and a member of the Academia Europaea since 1988. She has been Research Fellow of Birkbeck College (University of London), former President of the Spanish Association for Anglo‐American Studies, and Spanish member of the European Society for the Study of English Board. She has been leader of various competitive research projects and has written extensively on contemporary British fiction, narrative theory, ethics‚ and trauma. She has edited or co‐edited fourteen volumes of collected essays and is the author of five monographs, including Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles (1989), Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd (1999), and Jeanette Winterson (2006).
Graham Price lectures in the Department of Irish Studies at University College Dublin. He recently lectured in modern Irish and British Literature at the University of Limerick. He has supervised B.A. and M.A. theses on film studies, queer theory, Irish studies, and Irish drama. His
monograph, Oscar Wilde and Contemporary Irish Drama: Learning to be Oscar’s Contemporary, was published in 2018 and is the first book‐length examination of the Wildean strand in contemporary Irish theatre. He has published widely on Irish drama, Irish literature, continental philosophy, and queer theory. He currently directs two annual summer study abroad academic programmes on Irish literature for the University of California (Berkeley) and Bucknell University at University College Dublin. Graham’s co‐written book (with Darragh Greene), Film Directors and Emotion: An Affective Turn in Contemporary American Cinema, will be published in 2020 with McFarland Press.
Johnny Rodger is a writer, critic‚ and Professor of Urban Literature at the Glasgow School of Art. He has written extensively on James Kelman, and he co‐authored the volume The Red Cockatoo: James Kelman and the Art of Commitment (Sandstone 2011). His latest published books include Political Animal (Centre for Contemporary Arts, 2019); Spaces of Justice (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2018); and The Hero Building (Routledge, 2016).
Richard Russell, a native of Paris, Tennessee, is Professor of English and Graduate Program Director at Baylor University in Waco. He has published eight books and many essays on writers from Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Stephanie Schwerter is a Professor of Anglophone Literature at the Université Polytechnique Hauts‐de‐France. Previously, she spent six years in Northern Ireland, working at the University of Ulster and at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research interest lies in Northern Irish Film and Fiction as well as in the intertextual links between Irish, French, German‚ and Russian poetry.
Aleks Sierz FRSA teaches American students on the Boston University Study Abroad London Programme, and he is also a theatre critic and journalist. He is author of the seminal study of 1990s British new playwriting, In‐Yer‐Face Theatre: British Drama Today (Faber, 2001). His other books include The Theatre of Martin Crimp (Methuen, 2006/ 2nd edn. 2013), John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (Continuum, 2008),
Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today (Methuen, 2011), and Modern British Playwriting: The 1990s (Methuen, 2012), as well as other publications about contemporary British theatre. He has also co‐authored, with Lia Ghilardi, The Time Traveller’s Guide to British Theatre: The First Four Hundred Years (Oberon, 2015). His latest book is Good Nights Out: A History of Popular British Theatre 1940–2015 (Methuen, 2020).
Pilar Villar‐Argáiz is a Senior Lecturer of British and Irish Literatures in the Department of English at the University of Granada and the General Editor of the major series ‘Studies in Irish Literature, Cinema and Culture’ of Edward Everett Root Publishers. She is the author of the books Eavan Boland’s Evolution as an Irish Woman Poet: An Outsider within an Outsider’s Culture (Edwin Mellen Press, 2007) and The Poetry of Eavan Boland: A Postcolonial Reading (Academica Press, 2008). She has published extensively on contemporary Irish poetry and fiction, in relation to questions of gender, race, migration‚ and interculturality. Her edited collections include Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland: The Immigrant in Contemporary Irish Literature (Manchester University Press, 2014), Irishness on the Margins: Minority and Dissident Identities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), the special issue of Irish Studies Review (entitled ‘Irish Multiculturalism in Crisis’, co‐edited with Jason King, 2015), and the special issue of Nordic Irish Studies (entitled ‘Discourses of Inclusion and Exclusion: Artistic Renderings of Marginal Identities in Ireland’, 2016). Villar‐Argáiz is currently a member of the board of AEDEI (Spanish Association of Irish Studies) and EFACIS (European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies).
James Ward is a Lecturer in English Literature at Ulster University, with research interests in Irish studies, memory studies‚ and the intersections between literature, visual arts, and screen media. His Memory and Enlightenment: Cultural Afterlives of the Long Eighteenth Century was published by Palgrave in 2018.
Mark Williams lectures on contemporary literature at the University of Duisburg‐Essen. His research concentrates on alternative and speculative fiction‚ and he has published articles and chapters on urban fantasy, dystopian fiction, science fiction narratives, and politics and postmodernity.
Sue Zlosnik is Emeritus Professor of English at Manchester Metropolitan University. Working alone, she has published on a range of fiction by writers as diverse as George Meredith, Robert Louis Stevenson, J.R.R. Tolkien, Chuck Palahniuk‚ and Patrick McGrath, on whose work she published a monograph in 2011 (Patrick McGrath). With Agnes Andeweg, she co‐edited Gothic Kinship (2013). With Avril Horner, she has published six books, including Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination (1998), Gothic and the Comic Turn (2005) and, most recently, the co‐edited Edinburgh Companion to Women and the Gothic (2016).They have also written numerous essays and articles together, recent examples being ‘Gothic Configurations of Gender’ in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Gothic, edited by J.E. Hogle (2014); ‘The Apocalyptic Sublime: Then and Now’ in Apocalyptic Discourse in Contemporary Culture, edited by M. Germana and A. Mousoutzanis (2014); and ‘Daphne du Maurier: Sex and Death the Italian Way’ in Haunted Europe: Continental Connections in English‐Language Gothic Writing, Film and New Media, edited by Michael Newton and Evert Jan van Leeuwen (2020).
Preface
Richard Bradford
Companions to literary periods, genres, concepts‚ or even individual authors might differ slightly in terms of what their contributors have to say‚ but in all other respects they follow a prescribed formula. The first team of Romantic poets or Renaissance dramatists has already been chosen, with some slight controversy surrounding those who deserve to be on the bench, as it were. The menu of sub‐categories of literary theory is a given, as is the list of main texts and themes that determine the ways we research and teach major authors. But how do we set about prescribing the thematic contours and individuals that make up ‘Contemporary Literature’? Contemporary means the present, or at a stretch the recent past, and while we can gain some conception of the major players in the here and now by assessing their treatment by the ‘high cultural’ media – review articles, newspaper and magazine profiles‚ and interviews, TV and radio appearances, literary prizes, well‐publicized appearances at Hay, Cheltenham et al. – what we cannot do is predict that fame will endure. The long‐term legacy of a writer, their continued presence as valued literary artists thirty years after their death, is determined largely by academia. While modules in Contemporary Writing are attractive prospects for undergraduates, they are underpinned by an unanswered question: are the writers who feature most prominently in the module the ones who will by general consensus be formally installed in the canon in thirty years’ time? In truth, we don’t know. Routinely, the roster of major contemporary British novelists is headed by the likes of Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift‚ and others who rose to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s. They are all white, male, products of prestigious universities and, technically, pensioners. There are many competitors in the competition to become enduring literary ‘greats’, and these figures tend to be more varied regarding gender, ethnicity, background‚ and indeed talent.
In one respect‚ this volume is a detailed reference guide made up of individual chapters on given authors and on themes which reflect the ways that literature today questions what we might have taken for granted a generation ago. In another, it is an invitation to the reader to address the question raised above: who among contemporary authors will prove to be the more influential and enduring of her or his generation?
This volume is made up of three parts:
The First is the Introduction, which includes four short chapters that set the scene for what will follow, in terms of the boundary between the present and the past, and new developments in terms of genre, nationality‚ and locality.
Part Two, the longest, involves chapters on individual authors. Some began to make an impact as early as the beginning of the Sixties, but often their influence is still palpable for those who are far more recent, those who have variously curated and challenged the legacies of the old order. As a consequence, we have arranged them chronologically according to their dates of birth. You can, in literal terms, witness post‐1950s literary history in Britain and Ireland as it unfolds and spills into the twenty‐first century. We have selected authors for inclusion according to two main criteria: they are exceptional in terms of their treatment of their genre or genres, and potentially able to influence the near future of writing; they project into their work something of their background, circumstances‚ or sense of themselves (involving, ethnic legacy, gender and/or sexuality, affiliation to place, nation, class, etc.) that indicates how literature today is about our world. In due course‚ our selection might prove to be misguided‚ and in reading the volume today you might disagree with our choices. Read the chapters, make up your mind‚ and feed this dialogue back into your research, seminars‚ and essays.
The Third Part contains theme‐focused chapters that relate specifically to the Contemporary and involve issues as various as ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, and new formations of genre. Pick out concepts that interest you. Most of the authors who epitomize or engage with these themes will feature both in the Part Three chapters and be covered in more detail in chapters devoted exclusively to them in the Second Part. Make journeys between these parts and ask questions, such as: do the theme‐based chapters enable us to better frame and appreciate the achievements of individual writers? By classifying authors as
parts of an ongoing trend do we diminish their individuality and originality?
No collection on Contemporary Writing can make a claim to being comprehensive. By the same token, nor can an ordnance survey map tell you everything about your landscape: you need to explore the latter with the help of the former. So use this Companion as a map of the Contemporary; follow its routes, take note of its monuments and boundaries, but don’t trust it to tell you everything. It is a guide but eventually you will need to take it with you on an exploration of your own.
PART ONE
1Before Now: An Essay on Pre‐Contemporary Fiction and Poetry
RICHARD BRADFORD
Contemporary writers have dealt with the legacy of modernism in, roughly, three ways. Some have rejected it utterly, others have seen it as an inheritance that should be nurtured, and a few have taken a middle route, combining in their work aspects of tradition with the avant‐garde and experiment. To fully appreciate how we have reached this point‚ it would be useful to have a basic understanding of what has happened since the 1920s. I’ll begin with fiction.
Joyce and Woolf, albeit in different ways, treated the world not simply as something composed predominantly of prelinguistic states and objects to be articulated and represented by language – the premise of the classic realists – but rather as a condition and an experience that are, at least in part, dependent upon and modified by language. Moreover, the modernists challenged what had become the preeminent – some would argue the defining – characteristic of fiction since the eighteenth century: the demand that the novel, irrespective of its accuracy as a ‘mirror’, should tell a story. A narrative in which a succession of events and their effects upon characters operates as the structural core of the book is the mainstay of traditional fiction. Modernist writing, however, implied that storytelling, involving deference to an ever present question of ‘what‐happens‐next?’,
involves a reshaping of life and experience according to an arbitrary system of fabulation. In the novels of Joyce, Woolf‚ and Richardson, very little tends to happen; instead the focus shifts towards the process of representation and to conditions and states of mind. Whether this or the conventional reliance upon a cause‐and‐effect narrative backbone enables fiction to best fulfil its role as combination of art and a means of recording the world is the question that has divided advocates and practitioners of modernism and realism for almost a century. Few would deny that the attraction of having our disbelief suspended, of being drawn into the mindset of a character or a group of characters and following them through a sequence of compelling episodes‚ has maintained traditional fiction writing as far more popular than its experimental counterpart. This, however, raises the question of whether the preeminence of a story indulges a populist taste for fantasy, and that other means of writing should be employed to bring the book closer to the random unpredictabilities of life. By inference this question informs the work of novelists who sustained the modernist project beyond its heyday of the 1920s and 1930s.
Samuel Beckett’s 1950s fiction, including Watt (1953), Molloy (1956), Malone Dies (1958), and The Unnameable (1960) (all dates refer to Beckett’s own English translations from French), are extensions of the pioneering work of his friend and associate James Joyce. None involves a story or even a recognizable context beyond the imprisoned, self‐referring mindset of a speaking presence. If they can be said to have a subject it is
language, specifically the undermining of the assumption that reality can exist independently of the strangeness of language. Similarly, in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), Geoffrey Firman, alcoholic depressive British Consul to Somewhere, is less a character than a witness to the novel’s unbounded concern with the cyclic and unfathomable nature of truth and its quixotic confederate, writing.
Another postwar writer within this general tradition – referred to by some as postmodernism – is B.S. Johnson. Johnson’s novels are frequently cited as archetypes of metafiction –fiction whose principal topic is its own status as fiction. Travelling People (1963) extends the moderately experimental technique of the chapter‐by‐chapter shift in narrational perspective – already used by Aldous Huxley, amongst others – to include a more radical blend of foci, such as film scenarios, letters‚ and typographical eccentricities. In Alberto Angelo (1964), the author steps into the narrative to discuss his techniques and objectives, in arguably the most bitter and angry example of stream of consciousness yet offered. Johnson’s most famous piece is The Unfortunates (1969). This ‘novel’ is unbound, leaving it up to us to read 25 of the 27 loose‐leaf sections in whatever order we may wish to do so: the ‘story’ becomes as a consequence a mutable, dynamic intermediary between the processes of writing and reading.
In Christine Brooke‐Rose’s Such (1966), the book occupies the three minutes between the main protagonist’s heart failure and his return to consciousness, during which his past is recalled in a singularly unorthodox manner. David Caute’s The Confrontation (1969–1971) comprises three texts: a play, a critical essay (by one of the characters of the play), and a short novel. Each shares themes, characters‚ and perspectives with the others and by implication poses the question of whether identity is a condition of the various conventions of representation. Gabriel Josipovici in The Inventory (1968) and Words (1971) takes up the challenge of Caute’s experiment in genre interweaving by writing exclusively in dialogue, obliging the reader to construct a context and, to a degree, a story from their interaction with recorded speech. One could add to this list Ann Quinn’s Berg (1964), John Berger’s The Foot of Clive (1962), and Alan Burn’s Celebrations (1967),
all of which do self‐consciously unusual things with narrative sequence, description, perspective‚ or dialogue.
These constitute the vast majority of the postmodern novels written between the Joycean heyday and the late 1960s, and they are accurate exemplars of what modernism involved after Joyce. At the top of their agenda is the apparently unsteady relationship between linguistic representation and actuality, what goes on within a text and what exists outside it. Their watchword, if they had one, would have been self‐referentiality: that the familiar cliché of ‘suspending disbelief’ should be challenged, even forbidden, in the writing of fiction and replaced with an engagement with the very nature of language and identity. In short, novels should not so much tell stories as be about the telling of stories.
In 1954, less than a year after Beckett’s Watt came out and shortly before his Waiting for Godot was first performed in London, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim and John Wain’s Hurry on Down were published, for each their first novel in print. Both are regarded as embodying a new wave of postwar realism – intelligent, reflective of contemporary mores and habits, amoral‚ and contemptuous of the class distinctions and ethical norms that the likes of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell had carried forward from the nineteenth century. These novels might have been unconventional in manner and outlook – and in this regard they are frequently cited as exemplars of the ‘Angry’ mode of 1950s writing – but their formal characteristics were uncompromisingly orthodox.
There have been an enormous number of works on the postwar trends in English literature (see particularly R. Rabinovitz’s The Reaction Against Experiment in the English Novel, 1950–1960, Columbia University Press, 1967 and Blake Morrison’s The Movement, Oxford University Press, 1980), and all tend to rehearse the standard postulate that Amis, Wain, William Cooper, C. P. Snow, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Philip Larkin et al. felt threatened by modernism and were involved in an attempt to reinstall nineteenth‐century classic realism as the institutionalized mainstay of fiction writing. This is misleading, in two respects. First‚ the idea that the countermodernists felt in some way besieged by the encroachments of the prewar avant‐garde is a flawed myth. Book sales alone testified to the fact that, as
Kingsley Amis put it, ‘believable stories’ were a great deal more attractive to the general reading public of 1950s Britain than novels which, sentence by sentence, challenged the conventions of reading and representation. Indeed‚ those realist novelists who had begun their careers at the same time as the arrival of modernism – figures such as Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh‚ and Graham Greene – and had as a consequence been obliged to function in its more powerful cultural presence remained, after the war, far more popular than Joyce or Beckett. Second, the postwar realists certainly did not see themselves as mid‐twentieth century versions of Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope‚ or Henry James. In purely stylistic terms‚ there were similarities‚ but these were outweighed by the manner in which these were used by the 1950s writers. In truth‚ the postwar novelists were involved in a counter‐revolution against both the modernists and the classic realists. They rejected the mannerisms of the former as the obtuse, inaccessible preserve of an intellectual elite while they saw George Eliot’s notion of the Victorian novel as a ‘mirror’ to society as purblind hypocrisy. In the ‘Books of the year’ survey for The Sunday Times of December 1955, W. Somerset Maugham senses the coming of a cultural apocalypse:
They do not go to university to acquire culture, but to get a job and when they have got one scamp it. They have no manners and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious. They will write anonymous letters to fellow undergraduates and listen to a telephone conversation that is no business of theirs they are scum. They will in due course leave the university. Some will doubtless sink back, perhaps with relief into the modest social class from which they emerged; some will take to drink, some to crime and go to prison. Others will become schoolmasters and form the young, or journalists and mould public opinion. A few will go into parliament, become Cabinet Ministers and rule the country. I look upon myself as fortunate that I shall not live to see it.
Maugham’s almost obsessive use of ‘they’ indicates his inability to distinguish the apparently threatening presence of the authors from their
unseemly creations‚ and the irony of the elder statesman of Edwardian realism being so appalled by the new generation of traditionalists points to the essential difference between the 1950s writers and their predecessors.
Maugham’s unease was caused by the fact that many of the new novelists – and he was particularly distressed by Amis and Wain – were able to execute clever, unnervingly realistic portraits of contemporaneity while showing a disdainful indifference to the cultural and ethical values with which fiction, as an art form, had associated itself since the eighteenth century. Not only did they refuse to judge their characters, they seemed in some instances to actually endorse bad behaviour. The novels of Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, John Braine, Stan Barstow‚ and Nell Dunn sustained and extended this unapologetic warts‐and‐all coverage of people and society. In Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), Arthur Seaton is rebellious, contemptuous of all types of authority – government, management, army, police – but he has no concern for an alternative moral or political agenda. Instead he unleashes his energy via drink, womanizing, fishing‚ and fist fights.
The countermodernist trend in postwar fiction was neither simply a reaction against the aesthetic of experimentation nor a continuation of techniques refined through the nineteenth century. Rather it was a new, unprecedented form of realism in which the author no longer felt beholden to any fixed or determining set of social or ethical mores; this, as we will see, is significant because these writers can be regarded as establishing a precedent for a considerable number of later twentieth‐century novelists who present society and its ills as little more than a patchwork of hopeless grotesques to be treated with nerveless, sometimes comedic, scrutiny.
Aside from the torch‐carriers for fundamentalist modernism and the new realists, there were a number of writers who from the mid‐1950s onwards are more difficult to classify in terms of their relationship with established precedent. William Golding’s fiction is accessible and stylistically conservative while shifting between historical periods, dealing with apocalyptic themes and continually blending the specific with the symbolic. Muriel Spark combines a mood of detached observation evocative of Greene and Waugh with an antithetical inclination to allow
her novels to become reflections upon the process of writing novels. Anthony Burgess indulges a more sceptical recognition of metafiction in Enderby (1963); Enderby is a writer whose obsession with the unreliable, tactile nature of language mirrors his prurient fascination with sex and his own insides. A similarly arch, satirical engagement with modernism’s close relative – structuralism –occurs in his MF (1971), a novel self‐mockingly enraptured by codes and anthropological riddles. Iris Murdoch’s 1960s fiction is imitative in that the personae and settings are recognizably contemporaneous, but Murdoch seems determined to endow each character with a symbolic presence more closely associated with Renaissance drama or the epic poem than the mid‐twentieth‐century novel. Doris Lessing in The Golden Notebook (1962) nods allegiance towards modernist radicalism by offering a multi‐perspective upon the temperament and experiences of Anna Wulf via four different notebooks, but each involves a conservative, naturalistic sense of authenticity. These writers are what Lodge refers to as ‘the hesitators’, allying themselves neither with the pure avant‐garde nor the gritty transparency of the new realism, yet invoking both. The most famous contribution to this quasi‐genre was John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). At one level this appears to be an exercise in historical ventriloquism, creating as it does a fabric composed of the styles and mannerisms of Victorian writers, literary and non‐literary. Fowles himself complicates this issue by continually interrupting the story to remind the reader that it is indeed a fiction and by implication the product of a subjective idiosyncratic presence – one John Fowles. Just to make sure that we don’t insist on suspending disbelief‚ he offers us two different endings, of equal plausibility. Its insistent play upon truth as a relative, elusive entity prompts comparison with Joyce’s Ulysses, yet in terms of accessibility Fowles’s novel is soundly traditional.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman is treated by many as a landmark, but it should in truth be regarded as such principally because of its isolation within a landscape of fiction that was still predominantly conservative in its manner and frame of reference. Within 18 months either side of its publication date‚ novels by long‐established scions of traditional writing appeared, notably Anthony Powell’s The Military Philosophers (1968),
Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt (1969), and C. P. Snow’s The Sleep of Reason (1968) and Last Things (1970). The countermodernists of the 1950s were still turning out solidly mimetic engagements with contemporary life: John Braine’s Stay With Me Till Morning (1970), Simon Raven’s Places Where They Sing (1970), Alan Sillitoe’s Guzman Go Home (1968), Stan Barstow’s A Raging Calm (1968), Kingsley Amis’s I Want It Now (1968) and The Green Man (1969), John Wain’s A Winter in the Hills (1970), and Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Something in Disguise (1969) are symptomatic of what can be regarded as the norm. None of them played self‐consciously perplexing games with the nature of writing; none caused the reader to question the experience of reading‚ and none subjugated reflections of contemporaneity to broader metaphysical concerns.
The novelists who began their careers in the 1940s and 1950s had rejected modernism not because they were possessed of some inbred or socially inculcated reactionary aesthetic. Rather, they had been confronted with a new Britain, a complete transformation of the economic and social infrastructure set in train by the policies of the postwar Labour Government and over the next 15 years driven by factors such as new levels of social mobility, the explosion of unprecedented types of popular culture – in radio, TV, cinema, popular music – all heavily influenced by America. Realism seemed to many to be the method demanded by these phenomena because the events themselves were so unusual. Modernism, it should be remembered, had evolved as a reaction against an apparent alliance between a society whose structures and perceptions of itself had remained largely unchanged for more than a century and novelistic conventions which seemed complicit in this sense of conservatism bordering on complacency. After the war, however, social change was so rapid and varied that the logical response, for the novelist, seemed to be to attempt to record it, to incorporate its particulars and incidentals as guilelessly as possible; mimesis rather than experiment became the preferred technique.
When David Lodge assessed the state of the fiction at the turn of the 1960s and presented the image of the ‘novelist at the crossroads’, he was addressing as much a socio‐historical as a literary issue. All of the radicals, the conservatives‚ and
