Susana Onega is Professor of English at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). She is the author of books on William Faulkner, John Fowles, Peter Ackroyd, and Jeanette Winterson. She has also written numerous articles and book chapters on these and other writers and has edited or co-edited volumes on contemporary fiction, narrative theory, ethics and trauma.Jean-Michel Ganteau is Professor of English Literature at the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 (France). He is the author of two monographs (on David Lodge and Peter Ackroyd) and of The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Literature (2015). He has written numerous articles and book chapters and has (co-)edited volumes on contemporary fiction, ethics and trauma, and vulnerability.

"A remarkably insightful volume which puts the ethics of fiction to the test of literary form. Turning its gaze on the grammar of genre, mode and characterization, it eschews generalization to pay attention to the conflicted legacy of the figure of the hero/heroine and to understand its lasting, if complex, agency." -- Catherine Bernard, Paris Diderot University

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionJean-Michel Ganteau and Susana OnegaPart IVulnerability and Self-Quest 1 Learning to Love: The Paradoxical Life Quests of the Male Protagonists in Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of TimeSusana Onega2 The Eclipse of Heroism and the Outing of Plural Masculinities in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child Georges Letissier3 Espousing the Wound: Dispossession as Practice in Jon McGregor’s So Many Ways to BeginJean-Michel GanteauPart IIVulnerability and Self-Definition4 "Am I Still Alice?": The Quest for "a Sense of Self" and Alzheimer’s Disease in Lisa Genova’s Still AliceChiara Battisti5 Anita Brookner’s Wounded HeroineEileen Williams-Wanquet6 Wounded Characters and Vulnerable Lives and Places in Ian McEwan’s SaturdayRosario AriasPart IIIMasochism and Loss of Affect7 Willed Wounds: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Masochism in A. L. Kennedy’s FictionMaria Grazia Nicolosi8 The Masochistic Self Quest of the Harassed Hero in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little LifeMerve Sarıkaya-Şen9 Reading through the Body: The Damaged Mind in Tom McCarthy’s RemainderRenate BroschPart IVVulnerability and Biopolitics10 "Caring, Dwelling, Being: The Phenomenology of Vulnerability in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go"Laura Colombino11 Wounded Subjects and Vulnerable Nature in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The LowlandAngelo Monaco12 Barely Alive: Rewriting Sacrificial Passion in Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael KPascale TollanceNotes on ContributorsIndex