The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction

Description

How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 2000s shape contemporary British fiction? The means of publishing, buying and reading fiction changed dramatically between 2000 and 2010. This volume explores how the socio-political and economic turns of the decade, bookended by the beginning of a millennium and an economic crisis, transformed the act of writing and reading. Through consideration of, among other things, the treatment of neuroscience, violence, the historical and youth subcultures in recent fiction, the essays in this collection explore the complex and still powerful relation between the novel and the world in which it is written, published and read. This major literary assessment of the fiction of the 2000s covers the work of newer voices such as Monica Ali, Mark Haddon, Tom McCarthy, David Peace and Zadie Smith as well as those more established, such as Salman Rushdie, Hilary Mantel and Ian McEwan making it an essential contribution to reading, defining and understanding the decade.

Nick Bentley is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Keele University, UK. He is author of Martin Amis (2015), Contemporary British Fiction (2008), Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (2007) and editor of British Fiction of the 1990s (2005). Nick Hubble is Reader in English at Brunel University London, UK and the co-editor of The Science Fiction Handbook (2013), The 1970s (2014), The 1990s (2015), The 2000s (2015) and London in Contemporary British Fiction (2016) all published by Bloomsbury. Leigh Wilson is Reader in Modern Literature at the University of Westminster, UK. She is the author of Modernism (2007) and Modernism and Magic (2013) and co-editor of The 1980s (2014) and The 1990s (2015) published by Bloomsbury.

This collection states its important aim from the outset. The editors' preface succinctly problematizes the difficulties of studying the ever-expanding period of 'The Contemporary' for students and academics alike ... The honesty of the premise for these essays on literature of the 2000s is both refreshing and followed through ... Laura Salisbury's exploration of neuroscience in fiction of the 2000s is the stand-out chapter of the volume. * Review of English Studies * The book is a wide-ranging and rigorously written scholarly work that will be of invaluable interest to students and academics working in the field of literary studies. * Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies *