Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel

Explores how the experience of time in contemporary British novels reveals the persistence of the utopian imagination today.

Caroline Edwards (Author)

9781108498708, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 11 July 2019

276 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.55 kg

'Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel succeeds in providing a substantial account of dominant aesthetic and philosophical traits in contemporary literary fiction as well as in utilizing utopianism as a mode of the not yet that can productively inform a postclassical approach to narratology that accounts for the complexities of the experience of time in the twenty-first century. Among the recent book-length contributions to utopian theorizing, it is one of the best and most substantial. … It is a book that will resonate with scholars and students who are interested in utopianism and futures studies from a range of subdisciplines, including literary studies, philosophy, cultural and media studies.' Mark Schmitt, Utopian Studies

This book examines the experience of time functions in a specific set of British novels to reveal the persistence of the utopian imagination in the twenty-first century. Through close textual analysis, Edwards develops a new strategy of reading such anticipatory 'fictions of the not yet', including novels by Hari Kunzru, Maggie Gee, David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Jim Crace, Joanna Kavenna, Grace McCleen, Jon McGregor, and Claire Fuller. Read in the context of the philosophical category of non-contemporaneity, these novels reveal a significant new direction in twenty-first-century fiction. Their formal inventiveness and suggestively non-mimetic encounters with otherwise realist narrative representations of contemporary experience open up a realm of utopian possibility that shines through in moments of temporal alterity: glimpses of the future, redeemed strands of past hopes, and alternative social worlds already alive in the present.

1. Introduction: daily into the blue
2. Reading fictions of the not yet
3. Death: moments of possibility
4. Transmigration: networking utopian times
5. Apocalypse: co-evolutionary futures
6. Epilogue: world as home.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]