A monograph analysing the symbolic role played by contemporary fiction in the break-up of political and cultural consensus in British public life.

Some of the most incisive writers on the subject rethink the relationship between Britain, England and English literary culture. It is premised on the importance of devolution, the uncertainty of the British union, the place of English Literature within the union, and the need for England to become a self-determining literary nation.

This book maps the most active and vibrant period in the history of British women's writing. Examining changes and continuities in fiction, poetry, drama, and journalism, as well as women's engagement with a range of literary and popular genres, the essays in this volume highlight the range and diversity of women's writing since 1970.

This volume investigates identity discourses and self-constructions/de-constructions in various texts through imagological readings of films, narratives, and art works, examining different layers of cultural identities, on the one hand, and measuring the literary reception of ethnic identity constitution to reveal both the self and hetero images, on the other. The book features theoretical and analytical approaches with insights borrowed from multiple disciplines, and mainly focuses on the application of imagological perspectives in the fields of literature and translation, and specifically in literary works “carried over” from one culture to another. It will be of interest for scholars and researchers working in the fields of literature, translation, cultural studies, and imagology, as well as for students studying in these fields.

This is the first study of the shape and diversity of the literary career in the 20th and 21st centuries. Bringing together essays on a wide range of authors from Australia, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, the book investigates how literary careers are made and unmade, and how norms of authorship are shifting in the digital era.

This book brings together a selection of essays on the reception and dissemination of Shakespeare’s plays in England and beyond from the 17th century to the present. Written from the perspective of a nation or cluster of nations in which Shakespeare has been used either to reflect, legitimize or challenge different versions of authoritarian rule, each of the chapters offers a picture of Shakespeare as unwitting commentator on some of the most significant and unsettling political events in Europe and elsewhere. Illustrating and analyzing changing attitudes to Shakespeare and his work in various tyrannical and post-tyrannical contexts in both Western and Eastern Europe, North Africa and South America, the volume provides insights into issues like the role of censorship and self-censorship in the revision and production of Shakespearean material; institutional controls on the dissemination and publication of Shakespeare’s work; assumptions and techniques in the staging of his plays; state intervention in the elaboration of a Shakespeare “canon”; the role of Shakespeare in the construction of identity under tyranny; and the pertinence or otherwise of the subversion/containment paradigm following events such as the collapse of communism and the so-called “Arab Spring”.

Brexit is a political, economic and administrative event: and it is a cultural one, too. In Brexit and Literature, Robert Eaglestone brings together a diverse range of literary scholars, writers and poets to respond to this aspect of Brexit. The discipline of ‘English’, as the very name suggests, is concerned with cultural and national identity: literary studies has always addressed ideas of nationalism and the wider political process. With the ramifications of Brexit expected to last for decades to come, Brexit and Literature offers the first academic study of its impact on and through the humanities. Including a preface from Baroness Young of Hornsey, Brexit and Literature is a bold and unapologetic volume, focusing on the immediate effects of the divisive referendum while meditating on its long-term impact.

A comprehensive, accessible and lucid coverage of major issues and key figures in modern and contemporary British literature.

A fresh set of concerns face the twenty-first century British novelist. In this study of the four key novelists Zadie Smith, Nadeem Aslam, Hari Kunzru and David Mitchell, the the changes in narrative approaches and critical directions of a new post-1989 fiction are explored. Close readings of the writers are informed by a range of contemporary theorists, critics and commentators to reveal the emphases of twenty-first century fiction. Terror, fear, consumerism, multinationalism, and corporatism: the terms circulating in culture and social networks are evident in Smith's faith in ethical living, Aslam's consideration of multiculturalism, the novels Kunzru builds around the politics of identity and in the importance Mitchell places on the interconnectedness of human life. By putting the emergence of a new British literary dynamic in the context of ethical as well as global contexts, this study analyzes the transformed fictional perceptions of a world no longer defined by the stand off of super powers.

Examining representations of the tattoo and tattooing in literature, television, and film from two periods of tattoo renaissance (1851-1914, and 1955 to present), this study makes an original contribution to understandings of crime and detective genre and the ways in which tattoos act as a mimetic device that marks and remarks these narratives in complex ways.