Decades of Contemporary British Fiction: The 1970s to the 2000s

Description

Moving beyond a survey approach, this collection explores British fiction's place among the cultural shifts and headline events of four distinctive decades. From the collapse of communism, through the rise of Thatcher to the shifts in global power, each volume evaluates the impact of social, cultural and political history on the fiction of the respective period. Breaking British fiction into its four constituent decades, the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s and the 2000s and using social, cultural and political contexts to understand its chronology means changing literary themes are properly accounted for and traditional readings opened up. Alongside the national reception, the series looks closely at how British fiction has been received internationally. Approaching the subject from the perspective of its disciplinary formation, The Decades Series is a crucial reference point for the progressive development of contemporary British fiction, not only a literary and cultural phenomenon, but as an academic field.

Leigh Wilson is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Westminster, UK. Nick Hubble is Professor of Modern and Contemporary 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. Philip Tew is Professor of English (Post-1900 Literature) at Brunel University, UK, Director of the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing and Director of the UK Network for Modern Fiction Studies. His many publications as both author and editor include Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond (Bloomsbury, 2013) and (co-edited with Emily Horton and Leigh Wilson) The 1980s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2014).