2010s

Nick Bentley is Senior Lecturer in English literature at Keele University, UK. He is author of Contemporary British Fiction: A Readers Guide to Criticism (2018); Martin Amis: Writers and Their Work (2015); Contemporary British Fiction (2008); and Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (2007). He is editor of British Fiction of the 1990s (2005), and co-editor of two volumes in Bloomsbury’s British Fiction: The Decades Series – The 2000s (2015), and The 1950s (2019). In addition, he has published 40 journal articles and book chapters on postwar and contemporary literature.Emily Horton is a lecturer in World Literatures in English at Brunel University, UK. Her research interests include contemporary fiction in English, specializing in trauma and affect theory; genre and popular fiction; and fictional explorations of globalization and cosmopolitanism. Her first monograph, Contemporary Crisis Fictions, was published in 2014. She has also co-edited two volumes: The 1980s: A Decade in Contemporary British Fiction, with Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson (2014); and Ali Smith, with Monica Germanà (2013).Nick Hubble is Professor of Modern and Contemporary English at Brunel University London. Nick is the author of the monographs Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (2006; second edition 2010) and The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (2017); the co-author of Ageing, Narrative and Identity (2013); and the co-editor of seven books with Bloomsbury Academic: The Science Fiction Handbook (2013), London in Contemporary British Fiction (2016), and five volumes in British Fiction: The Decades Series – The 1970s (2014), The 1990s (2015), The 2000s (2015), The 1950s (2019), and The 1930s (forthcoming 2021). Philip Tew is Professor of English (Post-1900 Literature) at Brunel University London. He has written, co-written, edited and co-edited over twenty five scholarly volumes, fifteen of which are published by Bloomsbury Academic, including: Reading Zadie Smith (2013); Ageing, Narrative and Identity (2013); Jonathan Coe (2018); and Growing Old With the Welfare State (2019); as well as in British Fiction: The Decades Series – The 1970s (2014), The 1980s (2015), The 1990s (2015), The 2000s (2015), The 1960s (2019), and The 1940s (forthcoming 2021). Tew has published two novels, Afterlives (2019) and Clark Gable and His Plastic Duck (2020) and a volume of novellas, Fragmentary Lives (2020).

A timely collection of outstanding and innovative scholarship, The 2010s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction firmly positions literature as an urgent intervention into the political and cultural crises of the present. It reminds us exactly why fiction remains such a vital and provocative force, and is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the dynamic landscape of contemporary writing.

• Contributors Series Editors’ PrefaceAcknowledgements Introduction: Fiction of the 2010s in the Context of a Country in TransitionEmily Horton, Nick Hubble, Nick Bentley and Philip Tew1. Fictions of the Break UpNick Hubble2. Fiction in the Age of Distraction: Reading and Attention in the 2010sAlice Bennett3. Border Crossings: Diasporic British Fiction of the 2010sEmily Horton4. ‘Defining it is a Struggle’: Working-Class Fiction in the 2010sMatti Ron5. What’s to-day? Politics and Typography in Ali Smith’s DecadeTory Young6. The ‘Teenie’ Novels of Jonathan Coe: Intertextuality, Satire, Parody, Farce and Irony Philip Tew7. ‘The English Problem’: Reading the Body Politic in Post-Brexit FictionsKristian Shaw8. Inexhaustible Literature? Contemporary Experimental Approaches in LiteratureMark P. Williams9. Speculative Fiction of the 2010sAnna McFarlane10. The Neo-mythological Novel: Re-writing the Epic in Contemporary British Fiction.Nick BentleyTimeline of WorksTimeline of National EventsTimeline of International EventsBiographies of WritersIndex