The 'Marginal' as a concept has become an integral part of the British novel as it stands at the turn of the century. Both popular and literary fiction since the mid-1970s has seen an increasing emphasis on the marginal subject. This study offers readings of a wide range of contemporary British novels that represent characters or communities at the margin of society. Nicola Allen analyses three conceptual categories representing the marginal subject in the contemporary British novel: the character of the misfit or outsider; the emergence of the grotesque; and the rediscovery of previously marginalized narratives such as myth and fantasy. This innovative and original monograph focuses on the contention that the contemporary novel of marginality conveys a belief in the socially transformative powers of narrative, and suggests that narrative has played a central role in bringing marginal politics and marginal issues to the fore in contemporary Britain.

The Contemporary British Novel is a lively, wide-ranging guide to the key issues in writing in Britain since the mid-1970s, including social change, gender, sexuality, class, history and ethnicity. Designed to address problems faced by students in the exciting but challenging field of contemporary fiction, the text is organised to focus on major topics including: - the changing nature of British identity; - the representation of urban identity and urban spaces; - class issues including the rise and fall of the middle class; - multiracial identity and hybridity. The second edition includes a new introduction and a new chapter on fiction since the millennium focusing on a post 9/11 aesthetic. Every chapter has been revised for the new edition and now includes an initial overview and recommended reading to offer guidance on further study. Includes readings of novels by: Martin Amis, Pat Barker, A. S. Byatt, Jonathan Coe, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie,Will Self, Zadie Smith, Jeanette Winterson among others.

An examination of the life, career, and oeuvre of the British novelist and biographer In Understanding Jonathan Coe, the first full-length study of the British novelist, Merritt Moseley surveys a writer whose experimental technique has become increasingly well received and critically admired. Coe is the recipient of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix Medicis, the Priz du Meilleur Livre Entranger, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prizes for Fiction, and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction. His oeuvre includes eleven novels and three biographies—two of famous Hollywood actors Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Stewart and one of English modernist novelist B. S. Johnson. Following an introductory overview of Coe's life and career, Moseley examines Coe's complex engagement with popular culture, his experimental technique, his political satire, and his broad-canvased depictions of British society. Though his first three books, An Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, and The Dwarves of Death, received little notice upon publication, Moseley shows their strengths as literary works and as precursors. In 1994 Coe gained visibility with What a Carve Up!, which has remained his most admired and discussed novel. He has since published a postmodern take on sleep disorders and university students, The House of Sleep; a two-volume roman-fleuve consisting of The Rotters' Club and The Closed Circle; a touching account of a lonely woman's life, The Rain before It Falls; a satiric vision of a misguided life, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim; and a domestic comedy thriller set at the 1958 world's fair in Brussels, Expo '58. Moseley explicates these works and discusses the recurring features of Coe's fiction: political consciousness, a deep artistic concern with the form of fiction, and comedy.

This collection of research explores the interaction of religious awareness and literary expression in English poetry in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many different types of poetics may be seen to be at work in the period 1875 to 2005, along with various kinds of religious awareness and poetic expression. Religious experience has a crucial influence on literary language, and the latter is renewed by religious culture. The religious dimension has been a decisive factor of modern English poetic expression of the last hundred years or so. The religious and mystical dimension of poetry of the period is borne out by the focus on, among other things, grace and purgation, the tension between time and eternity, redemption and the demands of eschatology, immanence and transcendence, and conversion and martyrdom. Chapters also explore how church practice and ritual, architecture and liturgy, play into the poetry of the period. This volume offers a comprehensive discussion of this important but often overlooked aspect of modern English poetry.

The Incarnation of Language investigates how the notion of incarnation has been employed in phenomenology and how this has influenced literary criticism. It then examines the interest that Joyce and Proust share in the concept of incarnation. By examining the themes of synthesis and embodiment that incarnation connotes for these writers, it offers a new reading of their work departing from critical readings that have privileged notions of radical alterity and difference.

A well argued, comparative study of male jealousy in literature and film, informed by critical theory and engaging with key philosophical figures such as Derrida, Freud and Lacan.

Much has been written about the girl sleuth in fiction, a feminist figure embodying all the potential wit and drive of girlhood. Her male counterpart, however, has received much less critical attention despite his popularity in the wider culture. This collection of 11 essays examines the boy detective and his genre from a number of critical perspectives, addressing the issues of these young characters, heirs to the patriarchy yet still concerned with first crushes and soda shop romances. Series explored include the Hardy Boys, Tow Swift, the Three Investigators, Christopher Cool and Tim Murphy, as well as works by Astrid Lindgren, Mark Haddon and Joe Meno.

Milton, Evil and Literary History addresses the ways in which we read literary history according to quite specific images of growth, development, progression, flourishing and succession. Goodness has always been aligned with a life of expansion, creation, production and fruition, while evil is associated with the inert, non-relational, static and stagnant. These associations have also underpinned a distinction between good and evil notions of capitalism, where good exchange enables agents to enhance their living potential and is contrasted with the evils of a capitalist system that circulates without any reference to life or spirit. Such images of a ghostly and technical economy divorced from animating origin are both central to Milton's theology and poetry and to the theories of literary history through which Milton is read. Regarded as a radical precursor to Romanticism, Milton's poetry supposedly requires the release of his radical spiritual content from the fetters of received orthodoxy. This literary and historical imagery of releasing the radical spirit of a text from the dead weight of received tradition is, this book argues, the dominant doxa of historicism and one which a counter-reading of Milton ought to question.

Twentieth Century Poetic Translation analyses translations of Italian and English poetry and their roles in shaping national identities by merging historical, cultural and theoretical perspectives. Focusing on specific case studies within the Italian, English and North American literary communities, spanning from ‘authoritative' translations of poets by poets to the role of dialect poetry and anthologies of poetry, the book looks at the role of translation in the development of poetic languages and in the construction of poetic canons. It brings together leading scholars in the history of the Italian language, literary historians and translators, specialists in theory of translation and history of publishing to explore the cultural dynamics between poetic traditions in Italian and English in the twentieth century.

"White trash" is a liminal figure that dramatizes the intersection of race and class. Contemporary British novelists like Irvine Welsh, Niall Griffiths and John King use this originally US-American stereotype to interrogate the racializing discourse of class in British society. Their novels are interdiscursive reflections of the figurations of race and class that still haunt the British cultural imaginary. "British White Trash" is the first analysis to comprehensively examine the adaptation of the "white trash" stereotype in major British novels. The study thus contributes to a critical understanding of racism and classism, its cultural representations and its underlying social processes.