Caroline Edwards - Böcker

This Companion presents an authoritative study of British utopian literature and culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Written by leading scholars, it offers a wide-ranging account of utopian thinking in novels, plays, films, TV, fanzines, and poetry. Scholars and students interested in the utopian imagination will find nuanced analyses of British texts, situated within their materialist contexts. With a particular focus on countercultural and subcultural narratives, the book explores how British utopian visions of better societies offer a forceful critique of contemporary inequities such as racism, gender-based violence, class politics, and ecological harm. Blending the utopian with other genres, including the dystopia, the post-apocalypse, and ecocatastrophe narratives, the texts discussed reveal powerful images of utopian possibility. These works offer us vital imaginative and critical resources at a time of ongoing political, economic, and social crises.

This Companion presents an authoritative study of British utopian literature and culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Written by leading scholars, it offers a wide-ranging account of utopian thinking in novels, plays, films, TV, fanzines, and poetry. Scholars and students interested in the utopian imagination will find nuanced analyses of British texts, situated within their materialist contexts. With a particular focus on countercultural and subcultural narratives, the book explores how British utopian visions of better societies offer a forceful critique of contemporary inequities such as racism, gender-based violence, class politics, and ecological harm. Blending the utopian with other genres, including the dystopia, the post-apocalypse, and ecocatastrophe narratives, the texts discussed reveal powerful images of utopian possibility. These works offer us vital imaginative and critical resources at a time of ongoing political, economic, and social crises.

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.

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.