2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction

Nick Bentley is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Keele University, UK. He is author of Martin Amis (2015), Contemporary British Fiction (2008), Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (2007) and editor of British Fiction of the 1990s (2005).Nick Hubble is Reader in English at Brunel University London, UK. He is co-editor of The Science Fiction Handbook (2013), The 1970s (2014) and The 1990s (2015) all published by Bloomsbury.Leigh Wilson is Reader in Modern Literature at the University of Westminster, UK. She is the author of Modernism (2007) and Modernism and Magic (2013) and co-editor of The 1980s (2014) and The 1990s (2015) published by Bloomsbury.

The list of writers considered is extensive, including Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Martin Amis, A. S. Byatt, David Peace, Hilary Mantel, Patrick McCabe, and Kazuo Ishiguro, to name just a few … Whether the writers discussed extend the techniques of postmodernism, the search in so many of these novels is for positions that assert objective reality or ethical values. Accordingly, the essays consider topics such as regionalism, youth subcultures, postcolonialism, historical fiction, the mingling of realism and experimentalism, and the “neuronovel” (new perceptions of the brain and the novel). The collection's four helpful appendixes provide time lines (of works, national events, and international events) and biographies of prominent writers. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.

• ContentsSeries Editors’ PrefaceAcknowledgementsContributorsIntroduction: Fiction of the 2000s: Political Contexts, Seeing the Contemporary, and the End(s) of Postmodernism Nick Bentley, Nick Hubble and Leigh Wilson1 Literary History of the Decade: Fiction from the BorderlandsMartyn Colebrook2 Special Topic 1: Subcultural fictions: Youth subcultures in twenty-first century British fiction.Nick Bentley3 Special Topic 2: Translating Neuroscience: Fictions of the Brain in the 2000sLaura Salisbury4 Postcolonial and Diasporic Voices: Contemporary British Fiction in an Age of Transnational TerrorLucienne Loh5 Historical Representations: Reality Effects: the historical novel and the crisis of fictionality in the first decade of the twenty-first centuryLeigh Wilson6 Generic Discontinuities and Variations Daniel Weston7 International Contexts 1: The American Reception of British Fiction in the 2000sAnne Marie Adams8 International Contexts 2: From multicultural enthusiasm to the ‘failure of multiculturalism’: British multi-ethnic fiction in an international frameUlrike TanckeTimeline of WorksTimeline of National EventsTimeline of International EventsBiographies of WritersIndex