British Literature in Transition, 1980-2000: Accelerated Times

Description

The literature of twentieth-century Britain's final twenty years represents a crash course in transitional history. In the aftermath of the 1970s, the nation's hopes of becoming more efficient were high, leading to the fundamental domestic shake-up that was Margaret Thatcher's neoliberal revolution (1979-90). Following the end of the Cold War, Europe was undergoing radical rejuvenation, while the world as a whole began to thrive on new levels of connectivity and proximity brought through rapid advances in communication technology. Later, in the 1990s, Britons were asked to countenance not only internal devolution, but also the crystallisation of a brand-new European and global order. This volume shows how British literature recorded contemporaneous historical change. It traces the emergence and evolution of literary trends as well as enduring transitional shifts in genre, tone, style and thematic preoccupation.

Eileen Pollard is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Chester. Her interview with Hilary Mantel was published by Textual Practice in 2015 and she is co-editor of the forthcoming collection of essays Hilary Mantel: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Berthold Schoene is Professor of English and Faculty Head of Research and Knowledge Exchange for Arts and Humanities at Manchester Metropolitan University. His books include The Making of Orcadia (1995), Writing Men (2000), Posting the Male (2003), The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (2007), The Cosmopolitan Novel (2009) and The Edinburgh Companion to Irvine Welsh (2010). He has co-edited special journal issues on 'Texting Obama: Politics, Poetics, Popular Culture' for Comparative American Studies (2012) and 'Cosmopolitanism as Critical and Creative Practice' for the Open University's Open Arts Journal (2013).