Twenty-First-Century Fiction
A Critical Introduction

This critical introduction examines the formal and thematic features common among twenty-first-century writers from around the world.

Peter Boxall (Author)

9781107006911, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 June 2013

275 pages, 3 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.7 x 2 cm, 0.51 kg

'In Twenty-First-Century Fiction … Boxall traverses a vast terrain, offering compelling close readings of more than a dozen novelists and connecting them with dozens more from around the world. His prose is lush and lyrical, his readings subtle and intellectually demanding. Sentence by sentence, both books are pleasure-reads for anyone who cares deeply about literary criticism.' Andrew Lanham, Notes and Queries

The widespread use of electronic communication at the dawn of the twenty-first century has created a global context for our interactions, transforming the ways we relate to the world and to one another. This critical introduction reads the fiction of the past decade as a response to our contemporary predicament – one that draws on new cultural and technological developments to challenge established notions of democracy, humanity, and national and global sovereignty. Peter Boxall traces formal and thematic similarities in the novels of contemporary writers including Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, W. G. Sebald and Philip Roth, as well as David Mitchell, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dave Eggers, Ali Smith, Amy Waldman and Roberto Bolaño. In doing so, Boxall maps new territory for scholars, students and interested readers of today's literature by exploring how these authors narrate shared cultural life in the new century.

Acknowledgements
List of illustrations
Introduction: twenty-first-century fiction
1. Late culture in the early twenty-first century
2. Inheriting the past: literature and historical memory in the twenty-first century
3. The limits of the human
4. A curious knot: terrorism, radicalism, the avant-garde
5. Sovereignty, democracy, globalization
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]