The financial crisis of 2008 quickly gave rise to a growing body of fiction: "Crunch Lit". These 'recession writings' take the financial crisis as their central narrative concern and explore its effects on consumer culture, gender roles and contemporary communities. Examining a range of texts including Sebastian Faulks' A Week in December, Adam Haslett's Union Atlantic, and John Lanchester's Capital, this book offers the first wide-ranging guide to these new millennial writings.

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.

Panta rhei. The world is in motion. So is literary production. New literary genres like digi fiction, text-talk novels, fan fiction or illustrated novels, to name a few, have developed over the last 20 years. And TEFL has to reflect these new trends in literature production. These are some of the reasons why this book is dedicated to the use of post-millennial literary genres in English Language Teaching. As all edited volumes in the SELT (Studies in English Language Teaching) series, it follows a triple aim: 1. Linking TEFL with related academic disciplines, 2. Balancing TEFL research and classroom practice, 3. Combining theory, methodology and exemplary lessons. This triple aim is reflected in the three-part structure of this volume: Part A (Theory), Part B (Methodology), Part C (Classroom) with several concrete lesson plans.

This edited collection, Political Economy, Literature & the Formation of Knowledge, aims to address the genealogy and formation of political economy as a knowledge project from 1720 to 1850. Through individual essays on both literary and political economic writers, this volume defines and analyses the formative moves, both epistemological and representational, which proved foundational to the emergence of political economy as a dominant discourse of modernity. The collection also explores political economy’s relation to other discourses and knowledge practices in this period; representation in and of political economy; abstraction and political economy; fictional mediations and interrogations of political economy; and political economy and its ‘others’, including political economy and affect, and political economy and the aesthetic. Essays presented in this text are at once historical and conceptual in focus, and manifest literary critical disciplinary expertise whilst being of genuinely broad and interdisciplinary interest. Amongst the writers whose work is addressed are: Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, David Hume, Thomas Malthus, Jane Marcet, J. S. Mill, David Ricardo, and Adam Smith. The introduction, by the editors, sets up the conceptual, theoretical and analytical framework explored by each of the essays. The final essay and response bring the concerns of the volume up to date by engaging with current economic and financial realities, by, respectively, showing how an informed and critical history of political economy could transform current economic practices, and by exploring the abundance of recent conceptual art addressing representation and the unpresentable in economic practice.

Based on readings of some of the leading literary voices in contemporary Irish writing, this book explores how these authors have engaged with the events of Ireland's recent economic 'boom' and the demise of the Celtic Tiger period, and how they have portrayed the widespread and contrasting aftermaths. Drawing upon economic literary criticism, affect theory in relation to shame and guilt, and the philosophy of debt, this book offers an entirely original suit of perspectives on both established and emerging authors. Through analyses of the work of writers including Donal Ryan, Anne Haverty, Claire Kilroy, Dermot Bolger, Deirdre Madden, Chris Binchy, Peter Cunningham, Justin Quinn, and Paul Murray, author Eóin Flannery illuminates their formal and thematic concerns. Paying attention to generic and thematic differences, Flannery's analyses touch upon issues such as: the politics of indebtedness; temporality and narrative form; the relevance of affect theory to understandings of Irish culture and society in an age of austerity; and the relationship between literary fiction and the mechanics of high finance. Insightful and original, Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction provides a seminal intervention in trying to grasp the cultural context and the literature of the Celtic Tiger period and its wake.

Contemporary British and American fiction is defined by financial markets' power over the global publishing industry and the global economy.

The present state of research in precarity demands meta-questions and hence we need to probe both philosophy and practice in light of precarity’s different manifestations. The plural perspectives by which this phenomenon can be addressed also suggest potential for further theorization alongside that of Butler and her critics. By inviting scholars and experts from different fields and disciplines, and by applying multiple frameworks, methodological approaches, and critical lenses, this volume seeks to explore the different facets of our precarious world, while providing insights into the challenges of our possible futures.

This book explores the role of radical ideas in contemporary fiction by nine critically acclaimed authors--Jonathan Lethem, Dana Spiotta, China Mieville, Thomas Pynchon, Rachel Kushner, Teddy Wayne, Colson Whitehead, Jacqueline Woodson, and Kim Stanley Robinson. All of them share interests in the politics of the left, the problems of protracted economic crisis, and the potentiality of post-capitalist ideas. Novels by these authors, this book argues, are defined by an imperative to confront current anxieties in left-thought, while, at the same time, evincing a nuanced degree of self-consciousness about the legacy of political radicalisms, the costs they accrue, and where they have led.

The study of contemporary fiction is a fascinating yet challenging one. Contemporary fiction has immediate relevance to popular culture, the news, scholarly organizations, and education – where it is found on the syllabus in schools and universities – but it also offers challenges. What is ‘contemporary’? How do we track cultural shifts and changes? The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction takes on this challenge, mapping key literary trends from the year 2000 onwards, as the landscape of our century continues to take shape around us. A significant and central intervention into contemporary literature, this Companion offers essential coverage of writers who have risen to prominence since then, such as Hari Kunzru, Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell, Jonathan Lethem, Ali Smith, A. L. Kennedy, Hilary Mantel, Marilynne Robinson, and Colson Whitehead. Thirty-eight essays by leading and emerging international scholars cover topics such as: • Identity, including race, sexuality, class, and religion in the twenty-first century; • The impact of technology, terrorism, activism, and the global economy on the modern world and modern literature; • The form and format of twenty-first century literary fiction, including analysis of established genres such as the pastoral, graphic novels, and comedic writing, and how these have been adapted in recent years. Accessible to experts, students, and general readers, The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction provides a map of the critical issues central to the discipline, as well as uncovering new perspectives and new directions for the development of the field. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of contemporary literature.

Literacy continues to be a central issue in anthropology, but methods of perceiving and examining it have changed in recent years. In this 1995 study Niko Besnier analyses the transformation of Nukulaelae from a non-literate into a literate society using a contemporary perspective which emphasizes literacy as a social practice embedded in a socio-cultural context. He shows how a small and isolated Polynesian community, with no access to print technology, can become deeply steeped in literacy in little more than a century, and how literacy can take on radically divergent forms depending on the social and cultural needs and characteristics of the society in which it develops. His case study, which has implications for understanding literacy in other societies, illuminates the relationship between norm and practice, between structure and agency, and between group and individual.