The 1990s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction

by Nick Hubble (Editor), Philip Tew (Editor), Leigh Wilson (Editor)

Overview

How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 1990s shape contemporary British Fiction?

From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the turn of the millennium, the 1990s witnessed a realignment of global politics. Against the changing international scene, this volume uses events abroad and in Britain to examine and explain the changes taking place in British fiction, including: the celebration of national identities, fuelled by the move toward political devolution in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales; the literary optimism in urban ethnic fictions written by a new generation of authors, born and raised in Britain; the popularity of neo-Victorian fiction.

Critical surveys are balanced by in-depth readings of work by the authors who defined the decade, including A.S. Byatt, Hanif Kureishi, Will Self, Caryl Phillips and Irvine Welsh: an approach that illustrates exactly how their key themes and concerns fit within the social and political circumstances of the decade.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474242417
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	05/21/2015
Series:	The Decades Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	16 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Nick Hubble is Reader in English at Brunel University London, UK and the co-editor of The Science Fiction Handbook (2013), The 1970s (2014), The 1990s (2015), The 2000s (2015) and London in Contemporary British Fiction (2016) all published by Bloomsbury.
Philip Tew is Professor of English (Post-1900 Literature) at Brunel University London, UK, Director of Brunel's Centre for Contemporary Writing and Director of the Modern and Contemporary Fiction Studies Network.
Leigh Wilson is Reader in Modern Literature at the University of Westminster, UK. She is the author of Modernism (2007) and Modernism and Magic (2013) and co-editor of The 1980s (2014) and The 2000s (2015) published by Bloomsbury.
Nick Hubble is Professor of Modern and Contemporary English at Brunel University London, UK and the co-editor of The Science Fiction Handbook (2013), The 1970s (2014), The 1990s (2015), The 2000s (2015) and London in Contemporary British Fiction (2016) all published by Bloomsbury.


Philip Tew is Professor of English (Post-1900 Literature) at Brunel University, UK, Director of the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing and Director of the UK Network for Modern Fiction Studies. His many publications as both author and editor include Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond (Bloomsbury, 2013) and (co-edited with Emily Horton and Leigh Wilson) The 1980s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2014).
Leigh Wilson is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Westminster, UK.

Table of Contents

Series Introduction, Nick Hubble (Brunel University, UK), Philip Tew (Brunel University, UK) and Leigh Wilson (University of Westminster, UK)
Volume Introduction, Nick Hubble (Brunel University, UK), Philip Tew (Brunel University, UK) and Leigh Wilson (University of Westminster, UK)
1. Literary History of the Decade, Martyn Colebrook (University of Hull, UK)
2. Re-Writing National Identities in 1990s British Fiction, Nick Bentley (Keele University, UK)
3. The Misery Index: Memoir Boom and Bust in the 1990s, Claire Lynch (Brunel University, UK)
4. Postcolonial and Marginal Voices, Sara Upstone (Kingston University, UK)
5. Caught between the Short and Long Twentieth Centuries:Temporal Displacement in the Historical Fiction of the 1990s, Nick Hubble (Brunel University, UK)
6. The Subversive Revolution: British Experimental Fiction of the 1990s, Katy Shaw (University of Brighton, UK)
7. International Contexts I: Possessed by the Other: The Reception of British Neo-Victorian Fiction in America in the 1990s, Lynn Wells (University of Regina, Canada)
8. International Contexts II, Anja Müller-Wood (Johannes Gutenberg Universitat Mainz, Germany)
9. International Contexts III
10. International Contexts IV
Timeline
Brief Biographies
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

The 1990s is another installment in ‘The Decades Series,’ which begins in the 1970s and extend to the 2000s. UK-based scholars Hubble, Tew, and Wilson collected eight essays, all by British scholars, that look at British fiction of the 1990s in the context of ‘emergent globalism’ and ‘dynamic geopolitical events.’ Works by writers of this period often undermine popular opinions and the ‘cultural and ideological myths’ propagated by mainstream media. The contributors discuss a wide array of novelists and fiction writers—Martin Amis, Iain Banks, A. S. Byatt, Will Self, Christine Brooke-Rose, Irvine Welsh, James Kelman, Julian Barnes, to name only a few. The essays are provocative, incisive, and carefully researched, and the volume is notable for its addenda, which include a list of writers, a chronology of national events, and a time line of international events. Such a period approach to fiction writing offers a vital clue to the connection between art and the world, a connection often not evident at the moment of publication. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.” – D. W. Madden, California State University, Sacramento, USA, CHOICE

From the Publisher