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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 By making use of Murry's unpublished journals and letters to complicate the arguments of earlier biographers and critics about his personal and professional relationships with Mansfield and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.

For Scottish Catholic writers of the twentieth century, faith was the key influence on both their artistic process and creative vision. Many of these writers trod in the footsteps of Graham Green, Evelyn Waugh and J. R R. Tolkien by converting to Catholicism. This book offers an absorbing history of the uncharted territory that is Scottish Catholic fiction. By focussing on one of the best-known of Scotland’s literary converts, George Mackay Brown, this book explores both the uniquely Scottish Catholic modernist movement of the twentieth century and the particularities of Brown’s writing which have been routinely overlooked by previous studies. George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination provides sustained and illuminating close readings of key texts in Brown’s corpus, and also discusses the importance of Brown’s unpublished early works, manuscripts and letters. It includes detailed comparisons between Brown’s writing and an established canon of Catholic writers, including Graham Greene, Muriel Spark and Flannery O’Connor. Ultimately, this book contextualises Brown’s place within Scottish Catholic writing, while revealing that Brown’s imagination extended far beyond the ‘small green world’ of Orkney, and embraced a universal human experience.

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.

This book challenges conventional views of the Edwardian period as either a hangover of Victorianism or a bystander to literary modernism. The text investigates the literary history of the Edwardian decade. This period, long overlooked by critics, is revealed as a vibrant cultural era whose writers were determined to break away from the stifling influence of preceding Victorianism. In the hands of this generation, which included writers such as Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Beatrix Potter, and H. G. Wells, the new century presented a unique opportunity to fashion innovative books for fresh audiences. Wild traces this literary innovation by conceptualising the focal points of his study as branches of one of the new department stores that epitomized Edwardian modernity. These ‘departments’ — war and imperialism, the rise of the lower middle class, children's literature, technology and decadence, and the condition of England — offer both discrete and interconnected ways in which to understand the distinctiveness and importance of the Edwardian literary scene. Overall, this book offers a long-overdue investigation into a decade of literature that provided the cultural foundation for the coming century.

This study undoes the customary division of the 1940s into the Second World War and after, focusing instead on the thematic preoccupations that emerged from writers’ immersion in and resistance to the conflict. Through seven chapters – Documenting, Desiring, Killing, Escaping, Grieving, Adjusting and Atomizing – the book sets middlebrow and popular writers alongside residual modernists and new voices to reconstruct the literary landscape of the period. This is a decade that does not fit into the canonical story of twentieth-century literature, and this book restores to prominence the innovative work undertaken in areas such as documentary prose, the short story, mainstream theatre and realist fiction. The book also examines the relationship between cinema and literature, exploring the extent to which transitions in narrative form cross the boundaries of media. Detailed case studies of novels, stories, drama and poetry provide fresh critical perspectives on a range of writers including Margery Allingham, Alexander Baron, Elizabeth Bowen, Keith Douglas, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Henry Green, Georgette Heyer, Alun Lewis, Nancy Mitford, George Orwell, Mervyn Peake, J. B. Priestley, Terence Rattigan, Mary Renault, Stevie Smith, Dylan Thomas and Evelyn Waugh. Arguing that the postwar is a concept that emerges almost simultaneously with the war itself, and that ‘peace’ is significant only by its absence in an emergent post-atomic cold war era, this book reclaims the complexity of a decade all too often lost in the fault-lines between pre-war modernism and the emergence of the postmodern.

From the new generation of London novelists, such as Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, to feminism in the writing of Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson, this book relates developments in fiction, poetry and drama to social change. The author shows how working-class writers such as James Kelman and Tony Harrison protested against Thatcherism, and explores the voices of Black British writers including Fred D'Aguiar and Hanif Kureishi. As for the theory of the decade, he relates the rise of postmodernism to the popularity of self-conscious modes of writing and other developments in literary theory.

Placing literary creativity within a changing cultural and political context that saw the end of Margaret Thatcher and rise of New Labour, this book offers fresh interpretations of mainstream and marginal works from all parts of Britain. Based on a framework of thematically-structured accounts, the individual chapters cover national identity, ethnicity, sexuality, class, celebrity culture, history and fantasy in literature from Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England. It offers its readers a comprehensive view of the changing and challenging literary landscape in this period, critically examining the fiction, poetry and drama as well as representative films, art and music. Placed within the broader context of a transformative political and cultural environment that included Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, Damian Hirst and Princess Diana, the book captures the energetic and sometimes provocative experimentation that typified the final decade of the twentieth century.

In the post-war imaginary of the West, ‘the Nazis’ became a cultural trope that served as a justification for defending democracy through military intervention. But in films and in fiction, the Nazis were also camped up, laughed at, eroticised and demonised as evil monsters. In fact, the representational rules of engagement with historical fascism have always been remarkably uncertain. This book examines why and how the penomenon of ‘fascinating Fascism’ has re-emerged once more after the end of the Cold War. What is its cultural function now, in a global era of Holocaust commemoration? How can any representation avoid the impasse of either re-evoking fascism’s original seduction or merely recycling previous fictional and cinematic clichés? This study discusses alternative history (Robert Harris’s Fatherland and Quenting Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds), the noir thrillers of Philip Kerr, perpetrator fiction (Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones) and resistance (Synger’s Valkyrie and Cartwright’s The Song Before It Is Sung). Crucially it suggests that contemporary culture has instrumentalised the Nazi trope for its own agandas: ‘the Nazis’ have become ‘our Nazis’. The book also points to some of the risks and responsibilities attendant on this appropriation as one of the peculiar, late legacies of the Second World War.

This book presents a radical re-reading of the cultural history of the Irish state, by demonstrating through original historical research and insightful new readings of key literary and artistic works that race has been central to the ways in which modern Ireland has defined itself. It examines the tropes of racial identity and racist distinction that underpin modern expressions of Irishness, and shows how a persistent concern with racial ideologies can be traced through twentieth-century Irish culture. In this study, James Joyce's Ulysses is read anew in the context of the gathering of the Irish Race Congress in Paris, and the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922. The works of Liam O'Flaherty, Samuel Beckett, W.B. Yeats and Jack Yeats are shown to engage critically with anthropological representations of ‘the Irish face’. The book examines a wide range of mid-century fiction as part of a public discourse about ‘foreign bodies’, and goes on to examine the critical conversations taking place in the 1960s and 1970s about figurations of blackness in Irish culture. A provocative revision of modern Irish cultural history, this book makes challenging interventions in Irish studies, literary and cultural studies, and critical race studies.

This work is the first book-length study of Scottish Great War literature. Rather than arguing the war exerted a singular influence on the country’s writing, the collection highlights the variety of literary, social, political, and philosophical reverberations of the war in Scotland literature. Part one of the collection presents multi-text case studies of nationalism, pastoralism, Scottish Great War prose, popular literature, women’s, letters to the editor, Gaelic writing, and philosophy. Part two contains essays devoted to individual authors, including canonical figures such as Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Nan Shepherd, Neil Gunn and John Buchan, as well as peripheral authors such as George A. C. Mackinlay, Charles Murray and Ewart Alan Mackintosh.

Focusing on the upsurge of interest in the Second World War in recent British novels, this book explores the ways in which secrecy and secret work – including code breaking, espionage and special operations – have been approached in representations of the war. It considers established writers, including Muriel Spark, Sarah Waters and Kazuo Ishiguro, as well as newer voices, such as Liz Jensen and Peter Ho Davies. The examination of the after-effects of involvement in secret work, inter-generational secrets in a domestic context, political allegiance and sexuality shows how issues of loyalty, deception and betrayal are brought into focus in these novels.

This reinterpretation of Greek tragedy focuses on the performative – the physical and civic – dimension of tragedy. It challenges the idealist, humanist, and universalist approaches that have informed our most cherished philosophical, psychoanalytical, and modern interpretations of Greek tragedy and, in so doing, asks us to renew our relation to these works and to our literary and philosophical inheritance. The book reassesses tragic form in relation to Athenian democracy and links it with a performative discourse that both excludes the feminine and relies on civic and private forms of mourning. At the same time, it explores the centrality of tragedy for thinkers of Modernity such as Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Hegel, Freud, Brecht, and Benjamin. Through a persuasive analysis of both classical theorists – Plato and Aristotle – and modern theorists – Benjamin, Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida, and Butler – the book significantly shifts the emphasis from a Sophoclean model of tragedy to a Euripidean one. Close readings of the performative aspects of Greek play texts help illuminate these ideas.