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This book explores the fiction, poetry, theatre and cinema that have represented the 9/11 attacks. Works by Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Don DeLillo, Simon Armitage and Mohsin Hamid are discussed in relation to the specific problems of writing about such a visually spectacular ‘event’ that has had enormous global implications. Other chapters analyse initial responses to 9/11, the intriguing tensions between fiction and non-fiction, the challenge of describing traumatic history and the ways in which the terrorist attacks have been discussed culturally in the decade since September 11. The book: contributes to the growing literature on 9/11, presenting an overview of some of the main texts that have represented the attacks and their aftermath; focuses on Don DeLillo, adding to the literature surrounding this major American novelist; focuses on Martin Amis, adding to the growing critical work on this much-discussed British novelist and essayist; and provides a critical analysis of the Oscar-winning film Man on Wire, regarding its oblique references to 9/11.

This book is centred on the relationship between the personal lives of writers and the works they produce. It develops a portrait of a circle of writers—John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield, and D. H. Lawrence—who significantly influenced the development of modernism in Britain. It investigates a complex intertextuality amongst the three writers and also explores their connections with other modernist figures, including T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Mark Gertler and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The book argues that Murry should be re-evaluated within the contexts of recent developments in modernist studies and contemporary theories of intertextuality. It considers Murry's role as a ‘circulator’ of ideas and reputations in his work as critic, editor, and novelist, and shows how his own reputation was shaped by his emotionally-charged relationships with friends, lovers, and colleagues. This focus on personal relationships leads to discussion of several theoretical issues: the concept of ‘genius’, the question of the ‘personal’ in an era of ‘impersonality’, the influence of psychoanalysis, and the rationale of twentieth-century confessionalism. By making use of Murry's unpublished journals and letters to complicate the arguments of earlier biographers and critics about his personal and professional relationships with Mansfield and Lawrence, and through intertextual readings of their fiction and his own novels and essays, the book contributes not only to Mansfield and Lawrence studies, but to current scholarly debates about the genealogy of modernism, the influence of literary coteries, and the marketing of modernism.

This book explores the ways in which a range of recent American novelists have handled the genre of the ‘coming-of-age’ novel, or the Bildungsroman. Novels of this genre characteristically dramatise the vicissitudes of growing up and the trials and tribulations of young adulthood, often presented through depictions of immediate family relationships and other social structures. The book considers a variety of different American cultures (in terms of race, class and gender) and a range of contemporary coming-of-age novels, so that aesthetic judgements about the fiction might be made in the context of the social history that fiction represents. A series of questions are asked: Does the coming-of-age moment in these novels coincide with an interpretation of the ‘fall’ of America?; What kind of national commentary does it therefore facilitate?; Is the Bildungsroman a quintessentially American genre?; What can it usefully tell us about contemporary American culture? Although the focus is on the contemporary period, this is placed in the context of reference to earlier novels and criticism of the genre, as well as historical changes in the status of the family, and the adolescent within it.

While the novel has traditionally been seen as tracking the development of the nation state, the author of this book queries whether globalisation might currently be prompting the emergence of a new sub-genre of the novel that is adept at imagining global community. The book introduces a new generation of contemporary British writers (Rachel Cusk, Kiran Desai, Hari Kunzru, Jon McGregor and David Mitchell) whose work is read against that of established novelists Arundhati Roy, James Kelman and Ian McEwan. Each chapter explores a different theoretical key concept, including ‘glocality’, ‘glomicity’, ‘tour du monde’, ‘connectivity’ and ‘compearance’. The book defines the new genre of the ‘cosmopolitan novel’ by reading contemporary British fiction as responsive to new global socio-economic formations. It expands knowledge of world culture, national identity, literary creativity and political agency by introducing concepts from globalisation and cosmopolitan theory. The book also explores debates on Britishness and ‘the contemporary’, with close reference to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the World Trade Centre attacks.

This is the first book-length critical study of the contemporary British poet, Don Paterson. It includes eight essays by leading literary critics and writers. These explore the social, historical, and personal dimensions of Paterson's poetry and prose. The book relates Paterson's work to the classical, medieval, early modern, modernist, and contemporary voices that inform it. It analyses the literary qualities across Paterson's poetry and prose, from his sonnets to his long sequences, his aphorisms to his versions and translations. It considers Paterson as a figure actively negotiating his place within literary history and theory, as well as confronting that history with humour and directness. It also includes two interviews with Paterson, a critical introduction, and a bibliography. Overall, it attends to key issues in British poetry and publishing, including: translation, national and international identities, spirituality and religion, the contemporary poetry industry, poetry and mathematics, the intersections of poetry, art and music, and psychoanalysis and the body.

This book examines the conflicts, dilemmas and contradictions that marked Englishness as the nation changed from an imperial power to a postcolonial state. The chapters deal with travel writing, popular song, music hall and variety theatre, dances, elocution lessons, cricket and football, and national festivals, as well as literature and film. ‘High’ and ‘popular’ cultures are brought together in dialogue, and the diversity as well as the problematic nature of English identity is emphasised. The case studies are linked by their interests in different kinds of performances of being English, and by a particular focus upon the voice and the body as key sites for the struggles of modern England. The book is a lively contribution to current interdisciplinary debates about Englishness, national cultures and postcolonial identities.

George Mackay Brown has long been recognised as one of the most original and important Scottish writers of the twentieth century. This book offers a comprehensive account of Brown's work from a philosophical perspective and offers a radical new approach to the study of Scottish literature. The importance of local community in the work of Scottish novelists ranging from Walter Scott to Neil M. Gunn has often been noted, but few critics have addressed the relation of this concept to current philosophical and sociological models of community. The book uses Brown's work as a primary case study to demonstrate that the relationship between the individual and the community is a dominant narrative question in Scottish fiction. It traces the development of Brown's writing in relation to contemporary developments in the study of community, drawing on both continental and Anglo-American traditions. Focusing on Brown's novels, it argues for Brown's importance not only within a Scottish literary tradition, but as a major thinker of community. The book also suggests the utility of community, as opposed to nation and region, for productive discourse on modern literature. Combining close readings with theoretical elaborations, and including a broad national and historical overview, the book offers a new perspective both on Brown's work and contemporary national literatures.

What does it mean when people use the word ‘Hell’ to convey the horror of an actual, personal or historical experience? This book explores the idea that modern, Western secular cultures have retained a belief in the concept of Hell as an event or experience of endless or unjust suffering. In the contemporary period, the descent to Hell has come to represent the means of recovering – or discovering – selfhood. In exploring these ideas, the book discusses descent journeys in Holocaust testimony and fiction, memoirs of mental illness, and feminist, postmodern and postcolonial narratives written after 1945. A wide range of texts are discussed, including writing by Primo Levi, W.G. Sebald, Anne Michaels, Alasdair Gray and Salman Rushdie, and films such as Coppola's Apocalypse Now and the Matrix trilogy. Drawing on theoretical writing by Bakhtin, Levinas, Derrida, Judith Butler, David Harvey and Paul Ricoeur, the book addresses such broader theoretical issues as: narration and identity; the ethics of the subject; trauma and memory; descent as sexual or political dissent; the interrelation of realism and fantasy; and Occidentalism and Orientalism.

This book presents a full and comprehensive account of the major writing of the modernist novelist James Joyce. Ranging right across Joyce's literary corpus from his earliest artistic beginnings to his mature prose masterpieces Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, it provides detailed textual analysis of each of his major works. The book also provides an extended discussion of the biographical, historical, political and social contexts that inform Joyce's writing and a wide-ranging discussion of the multiple strands of Joyce criticism that have established themselves over the last eighty years.

This book is a study of the psychological and cultural impact of the Cold War on the imaginations of citizens in the UK and US. It examines writers working at the hazy borders between aesthetic project and political allegory, with specific attention being paid to Vladimir Nabokov and Graham Greene as Cold War writers. The book looks at the special relationship as a form of paranoid plotline governing key Anglo-American texts from Storm Jameson to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, as well as examining the figure of the non-aligned neutral observer caught up in the sacrificial triangles structuring Cold War fantasy. The book aims to consolidate and define a new emergent field in literary studies, the literary Cold War, following the lead of prominent historians of the period. It looks at leading Anglo-American writers in terms of the Cold War as a psychological and fantasy phenomenon. It provides significant readings of key post-war writers.