Combining close readings of literature and theory, Sex, Time, and Space in Contemporary Fiction opens up new ways to consider the sex-time-space nexus. In an exciting and compelling contribution to contemporary literary studies, this book takes the concept of ‘exceptionality’ as its point of departure as developed through an exploration of Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception and the work of theorists including Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Through an analysis of a range of widely read contemporary fiction, including On Chesil Beach, Gertrude and Claudius, The Act of Love and Room, Ben Davies provides a rigorous exploration of narrative form and offers original theories of the prequel, narrative relations in terms of set theory, and the practice of reading itself.

Science fiction-roman.

The novelist Howard Jacobson, who received the 2010 Booker Prize for The Finkler Question, has often been characterized as the ""British Philip Roth"",although he himself prefers to be viewed as the ""Jewish Jane Austen"". This monograph concludes that both comparisons may be used to comment on various features of Jacobson's oeuvre. Like Roth, Jacobson tends to focus on male Jewish protagonists and intimate relations between the sexes. Like Austen, he portrays a certain social class, whether it be the British Jewish minority or the social world of British writers and university professors. Apart from reflecting on the tension between Britishness and Jewishness as inseparable aspects of his characters' identities, Jacobson's novels contribute to the traditions of British and Jewish humour.

This book explores the intersection between the recent work on queer temporality and the experiments of literary modernism. Kate Haffey argues that queer theory’s recent work on time owes a debt to modernist authors who developed new ways of representing temporality in their texts. By reading a series of early twentieth-century literary texts from modernists like Woolf, Eliot, Faulkner, and Stein alongside contemporary authors, this book examines the way in which modernist writers challenged narrative conventions of time in ways that both illuminate and foreshadow current scholarship on queer temporality. In her analyses of contemporary novelists and critics Michael Cunningham, Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, and Eve Sedgwick, Haffey also shows that these modernist temporalities have been reconfigured by contemporary authors to develop new approaches to futurity.

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • An outsider who can travel between worlds discovers a secret that threatens the very fabric of the multiverse in this stunning debut, a powerful examination of identity, privilege, and belonging. WINNER OF THE COMPTON CROOK AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE LOCUS AWARD • “Gorgeous writing, mind-bending world-building, razor-sharp social commentary, and a main character who demands your attention—and your allegiance.”—Rob Hart, author of The Warehouse ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—NPR, Library Journal, Book Riot Multiverse travel is finally possible, but there’s just one catch: No one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive. Enter Cara, whose parallel selves happen to be exceptionally good at dying—from disease, turf wars, or vendettas they couldn’t outrun. Cara’s life has been cut short on 372 worlds in total. On this dystopian Earth, however, Cara has survived. Identified as an outlier and therefore a perfect candidate for multiverse travel, Cara is plucked from the dirt of the wastelands. Now what once made her marginalized has finally become an unexpected source of power. She has a nice apartment on the lower levels of the wealthy and walled-off Wiley City. She works—and shamelessly flirts—with her enticing yet aloof handler, Dell, as the two women collect off-world data for the Eldridge Institute. She even occasionally leaves the city to visit her family in the wastes, though she struggles to feel at home in either place. So long as she can keep her head down and avoid trouble, Cara is on a sure path to citizenship and security. But trouble finds Cara when one of her eight remaining doppelgängers dies under mysterious circumstances, plunging her into a new world with an old secret. What she discovers will connect her past and her future in ways she could have never imagined—and reveal her own role in a plot that endangers not just her world but the entire multiverse. “Clever characters, surprise twists, plenty of action, and a plot that highlights social and racial inequities in astute prose.”—Library Journal (starred review)

This book offers to delineate a key phenomenon in contemporary Anglophone fiction: novel expansion, when the plot and characters from a finished novel are retrieved to be developed in new adventures set before, after or during the narrative time of the source-text. If autographic and allographic sequels are almost as old as literature, prequels – that imagine the anteriority of a narrative – and coquels – that develop secondary characters in the same story time as the source-text – are more recent. The overall trend for novel expansion spread in the mid-1980s and 1990s and has since shown no sign of abating. This volume is organised following three types of relationships to the source-texts even if these occasionally combine to produce a more complex structure. This book comprises 11 essays, preceded by an introduction, that examine narrative strategies, aesthetic, ethical and political tendencies underlying these novel expansions. Following the overview provided in the introduction, the reader will find case studies of prequels, coquels and sequels before a final chapter that encompasses them all and more.

Combining close readings of literature and theory, Sex, Time, and Space in Contemporary Fiction opens up new ways to consider the sex-time-space nexus. In an exciting and compelling contribution to contemporary literary studies, this book takes the concept of ‘exceptionality’ as its point of departure as developed through an exploration of Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception and the work of theorists including Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Through an analysis of a range of widely read contemporary fiction, including On Chesil Beach, Gertrude and Claudius, The Act of Love and Room, Ben Davies provides a rigorous exploration of narrative form and offers original theories of the prequel, narrative relations in terms of set theory, and the practice of reading itself.

Celebrated as a poet, novelist and non-fiction writer, and the winner of numerous major literary prizes including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, John Burnside is one of Britain's leading contemporary writers. John Burnside: Contemporary Critical Perspectives brings together leading scholars of contemporary literature to guide readers through the full range of the author's writings, from his fiction and poetry to his autobiographical and nature writing, exploring texts such as The Dumb House, The Light Trap, A Lie about My Father, Glister and Black Cat Bone. The book examines the major themes of Burnside's work, including the environment and the natural world, hauntings and dwelling, and his intertextual engagement with philosophy, music and the visual arts. Featuring a timeline of Burnside's life, an interview with the writer himself and a detailed list of further reading, this is the first authoritative guide to this major contemporary writer.

A much-needed introduction to the field of contemporary fiction studies. Introduces key areas of debate and offers in-depth discussions of the most significant texts. An ideal guide for those studying contemporary fiction for the first time.

2023 Perkins Prize of the International Society for the Study of Narrative ESSE Book Award for Junior Scholars for a book in the field of Literatures in the English Language Responding to the current surge in present-tense novels, Making Time is an innovative contribution to narratological research on present-tense usage in narrative fiction. Breaking with the tradition of conceptualizing the present tense purely as a deictic category denoting synchronicity between a narrative event and its presentation, the study redefines present-tense narration as a fully-fledged narrative strategy whose functional potential far exceeds temporal relations between story and discourse. The first part of the volume presents numerous analytical categories that systematically describe the formal, structural, functional, and syntactic dimensions of present-tense usage in narrative fiction. These categories are then deployed to investigate the uses and functions of present-tense narration in selected twenty-first century novels, including Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Ian McEwan’s Nutshell, and Irvine Welsh’s Skagboys. The seven case studies serve to illustrate the ubiquity of present-tense narration in contemporary fiction, ranging from the historical novel to the thriller, and to investigate the various ways in which the present tense contributes to narrative worldmaking.