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A detailed examination of the growing genre of British fiction featuring archives and archival research, from A.S. Byatt's Booker Prize-winning Possession to the paperback thrillers of popular novelists.
Drawing on a variety of theoretical approaches including trauma theory, psychoanalysis, genre theory, narrative theory, theories of temporality, cultural theory, and ethics, this book breaks new ground in bringing together trauma and romance, two categories whose collaboration has never been addressed in such a systematic and in-depth way. The volume shows how romance strategies have become an essential component of trauma fiction in general and traumatic realism in particular. It brings to the fore the deconstructive powers of the darker type of romance and its adequacy to perform traumatic acting out and fragmentation. It also zooms in on the variations on the ghost story as medium for the evocation of trans-generational trauma, as well as on the therapeutic drive of romance that favors a narrative presentation of the working-through phase of trauma. Chapters explore various acceptations and extensions of psychic trauma, from the individual to the cultural, analyzing narrative texts that belong in various genres from the ghost story to the misery memoir to the graphic novel. The selection of primary sources allows for a review of leading contemporary British authors such as Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift, Sarah Waters and Jeanette Winterson, and of those less canonical such as Jackie Kay, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Justine Picardie, Peter Roche and Adam Thorpe.
Not only does the library have a long and complex history and politics, but it has an ambivalent presence in Western culture – both a site of positive knowledge and a site of error, confusion, and loss. Nevertheless, in literary studies and in the humanities, including book history, the figure of the library remains in many senses under-researched. This collection brings together established and up-and-coming researchers from a number of practices – literary and cultural studies, gender studies, book history, philosophy, visual culture, and contemporary art –with an effective historical sweep ranging from the time of Sumer to the present day. In the context of the rise of archive studies, this book attends specifically and meta-critically to the figure of the library as a particular archival form, considering the traits that constitute (or fail to constitute) the library as institution or idea, and questions its relations to other accumulative modes, such as the archive in its traditional sense, the museum, or the filmic or digital archive. Across their diversity, and in addition to their international standard of research and writing, each chapter is unified by commitment to analyzing the complex cultural politics of the library form.
This book visits vulnerability in contemporary British fiction, considering vulnerability in its relation to poetics, politics, ethics, and trauma. Vulnerability and risk have become central issues in contemporary culture, and artistic productions have increasingly made it their responsibility to evoke various types of vulnerabilities, from individual fragilities to economic and political forms of precariousness and dispossession. Informed by trauma studies and the ethics of literature, this book addresses such issues by focusing on the literary evocations of vulnerability and analyzing various aspects of vulnerable form as represented and performed in British narratives, from contemporary classics by Peter Ackroyd, Pat Barker, Anne Enright, Ian McEwan, and Jeanette Winterson, to less canonical texts by Nina Allan, Jon McGregor, and N. Royle. Chapters on romance, elegy, the ghost story, and the state-of-the-nation novel draw on a variety of theoretical approaches from the fields of trauma studies, affect theory, the ethics of alterity, the ethics of care, and the ethics of vulnerability, among others. Showcasing how the contemporary novel is the privileged site of the expression and performance of vulnerability and vulnerable form, the volume broaches a poetics of vulnerability based on categories such as testimony, loss, unknowing, temporal disarray, and performance. On top of providing a book-length evocation of contemporary fictions of vulnerability and vulnerable form, this volume contributes significantly to considerations of the importance of Trauma Studies to Contemporary Literature.
Traditionally the scene of some of London’s poorest, most crime-ridden neighborhoods, the East End of London has long been misunderstood as abject and deviant. As a landing place for migrants and newcomers, however, it has also been memorably and colorfully represented in the literature of Victorian authors such as Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. In Strangers in the Archive, Heidi Kaufman applies the resources of archives both material and digital to move beyond icon and stereotype to reveal a deeper understanding of East End literature and culture in the Victorian age. Kaufman uncovers this engaging new perspective on the East End through Maria Polack’s Fiction without Romance (1830), the first novel to be published by an English Jew, and through records of Polack’s vibrant community. Although scholars of nineteenth-century London and readers of East End fictions persist in privileging sensational narratives of Jack the Ripper and the infamous "Fagin the Jew" as signs of universal depravity among East End minority ethnic and racial groups, Strangers in the Archive considers how archival materials are uniquely capable of redressing cultural silences and marginalized perspectives as well as reshaping conceptions of the global significance of literary and print culture in nineteenth-century London. Many of this book’s subjects—including digital editions of rare books and manuscript diaries, multimedia maps, and other related East End print records—can be viewed online at the Lyon Archive and the Polack Archive.
This study looks back at the picaresque, with its Spanish roots, and especially with its tradition in English literature; then, it comes to contemporary times, and identifies elements of the picaresque in contemporary novels. The main thesis of the author is that the picaresque has never left the literary scene in Britain, being an aesthetic invariant, which expresses a natural inclination of the British authors towards the picaresque story. Postcolonial authors also favour this genre as a consequence of their own literary tradition, which includes particular variants of the picaresque, and as a result of their own situation as immigrant/displaced authors, which gives them material for stories of displaced characters – rogues. The study rigorously identifies the sources of the contemporary protocols of the picaresque, as well as a few variants of picaresque stories in a selection of novels the author accounts for theoretically.
How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 1990s shape contemporary British Fiction? From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the turn of the millennium, the 1990s witnessed a realignment of global politics. Against the changing international scene, this volume uses events abroad and in Britain to examine and explain the changes taking place in British fiction, including: the celebration of national identities, fuelled by the move toward political devolution in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales; the literary optimism in urban ethnic fictions written by a new generation of authors, born and raised in Britain; the popularity of neo-Victorian fiction. Critical surveys are balanced by in-depth readings of work by the authors who defined the decade, including A.S. Byatt, Hanif Kureishi, Will Self, Caryl Phillips and Irvine Welsh: an approach that illustrates exactly how their key themes and concerns fit within the social and political circumstances of the decade.
Absent the Archive is the first cultural history devoted to literary and visual representations of the police massacre of peaceful Algerian protesters. This corpus, or anarchive, includes a variety of cultural texts whose formal, diegetic, and discursive strategies represent the massacre and its erasure, its "becoming invisible," and its afterlives as a trace, a memory, a sign.
Shows how central the Second World War still is to post-war writing. Focusing on the upsurge of interest in the Second World War in recent British novels, this monograph explores the ways in which secrecy and secret work - including code-breaking, espionage and special operations - have been approached in representations of the war. It considers established writers, including Muriel Spark, Sarah Waters and Kazuo Ishiguro, as well as newer voices, such as Liz Jensen and Peter Ho Davies. The examination of the after-effects of involvement in secret work, inter-generational secrets in a domestic context, political allegiance and sexuality shows how issues of loyalty, deception and betrayal are brought into focus in these novels.