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)

9781108712392, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 8 July 2021

277 pages
22.9 x 15 x 1.7 cm, 0.43 kg

'Edwards offers a convincing analysis of how contemporary British Fiction has drawn upon the resources of [science fiction] and other non-mimetic devices in order to prise open the utopian potentials within the present moment … an essential book for [science fiction] readers …' Paul March Russel, Foundation

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]