Kristian Shaw – författare

Britain’s vote to leave the European Union in the summer of 2016 came as a shock to many observers. But writers had long been exploring anxieties and fractures in British society – from Euroscepticism, to immigration, to devolution, to post-truth narratives – that came to the fore in the Brexit campaign and its aftermath. Reading these tensions back into contemporary British writing, Kristian Shaw coins the term Brexlit to deliver the first in-depth study of how writers engaged with these issues before and after the referendum result. Examining the work of over a hundred British authors, including Julian Barnes, Jonathan Coe, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ali Smith, as well as popular fiction by Andrew Marr and Stanley Johnson, Brexlit explores how a new and urgent genre of post-Brexit fiction is beginning to emerge.

Britain’s vote to leave the European Union in the summer of 2016 came as a shock to many observers. But writers had long been exploring anxieties and fractures in British society – from Euroscepticism, to immigration, to devolution, to post-truth narratives – that came to the fore in the Brexit campaign and its aftermath. Reading these tensions back into contemporary British writing, Kristian Shaw coins the term Brexlit to deliver the first in-depth study of how writers engaged with these issues before and after the referendum result. Examining the work of over a hundred British authors, including Julian Barnes, Jonathan Coe, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ali Smith, as well as popular fiction by Andrew Marr and Stanley Johnson, Brexlit explores how a new and urgent genre of post-Brexit fiction is beginning to emerge.

This book is the first edited collection to focus on the work of contemporary author Hari Kunzru. It contains major new essays on each of his novels – The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions, Gods Without Men, White Tears and Red Pill – as well as his short fiction and non-fiction writings. The collection situates Kunzru’s work within current debates regarding postmodernism, postcolonialism, and post-postmodernism, and examines how Kunzru’s work is central to major thematic concerns of contemporary writing including whiteness, national identity, Britishness, cosmopolitanism, music, space, memory, art practice, trauma, Brexit, immigration, covid-19, and populist politics. The book engages with current debates regarding the politics of publishing of ethnic writers, examining how Kunzru has managed to shape a career in resistance of narrow labelling where many other writers have struggled to achieve long-term recognition.

This is the first work of criticism to reappraise all of this leading transnational author’s film, television, short fiction and novel writing following his award of the Nobel Prize in 2017. Comprising contributions from world-leading Ishiguro scholars as well as new voices, the collection offers chapters devoted to each of the major works, each of which draws out thematic and stylistic connections with his body of work, both literary and filmic. This timely study, following the critical and popular success of his most recent fiction and his recognition by the Nobel committee, is the only comprehensive study of an author at the forefront of world literature.

This is the first work of criticism to reappraise all of this leading transnational author’s film, television, short fiction and novel writing following his award of the Nobel Prize in 2017. Comprising contributions from world-leading Ishiguro scholars as well as new voices, the collection offers chapters devoted to each of the major works, each of which draws out thematic and stylistic connections with his body of work, both literary and filmic. This timely study, following the critical and popular success of his most recent fiction and his recognition by the Nobel committee, is the only comprehensive study of an author at the forefront of world literature.

— Dr Sara Upstone, Principal Lecturer in English Literature, Kingston University, UK.This study of cosmopolitanism in contemporary British and American fiction identifies several authors who forge new and intensified dialogues between local experience and global flows.