Contemporary British Novel

James Acheson is former Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He is author of Samuel Beckett's Artistic Theory and Practice: Criticism, Drama, Early Fiction, and John Fowles, and is coeditor (with Sarah C.E. Ross) of The Contemporary British Novel Since 1980. Sarah Ross is a Lecturer in English at Massey University, New Zealand, where she teaches Medieval and Renaissance literature and contemporary fiction. She has published in the fields of early modern women’s writing and manuscript culture, and has contributed to the publications of the Perdita Project and the John Nichols Project (University of Warwick). Her interests in feminism and historicism run through her work in the early modern and contemporary periods.

• Introduction: James Acheson and Sarah Ross A. Realism and Other '-isms':Chapter 1: 'Realism, Dreams, and the Unconscious in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro' -- Frederick M. HolmesChapter 2: 'Ian McEwan: Contemporary Realism and the Novel of Ideas' --Judith SeaboyerChapter 3: 'The Unnatural Scene: The Fiction of Irvine Welsh' --Alan RiachChapter 4: 'Angela Carter's Magic Realism' --David PunterChapter 5: 'Facticity, or Something Like That: The Novels of James Kelman’ --Laurence NicollChapter 6: ‘One Nation, Oneself: Politics, Place and Identity in Martin Amis’ Fiction’ --Daniel Lea B. Postcolonialism and Other '-isms':Chapter 7: 'Abdulrazak Gurnah and Hanif Kureishi: Failed Revolutions' --Bruce King Chapter 8: 'Salman Rushdie's Fathers' --Hermione LeeChapter 9: 'Postcolonialism and 'the Figure of the Jew': Caryl Phillips and Zadie Smith' --Bart Moore-GilbertChapter 10: 'Mixing and Metamorphing: Articulations of Feminism and Postcoloniality in Marina Warner's Fiction' --Chantal Zabus C. Feminism and Other '-isms':Chapter 11: 'Regeneration, Redemption, Resurrection: Pat Barker and the Problem of Evil’ – Sarah RossChapter 12: 'Partial to Intensity: The Novels of A.L. Kennedy’ --Glenda NorquayChapter 13: ‘Gender and Creativity in the Fictions of Janice Galloway' --Dorothy McMillanChapter 14: 'Appetite, Desire and Belonging in the Novels of Rose Tremain' --Sarah SceatsChapter 15: 'Desire for Syzygy in the Novels of A.S. Byatt' --Katherine TarboxChapter 16: 'Jeanette Winterson and the Lesbian Postmodern: Storytelling, Performativity and the Gay Aesthetic'--Paulina PalmerD. Postmodernism and Other '-isms':Chapter 17: '(Re)constituted Pasts: Postmodern Historicism in the Novels of Graham Swift and Julian Barnes' --Daniel BedggoodChapter 18: 'Colonising the Past: The Novels of Peter Ackroyd' --David Leon HigdonChapter 19: 'Player of Games: Iain (M.) Banks

This challenging collection of original essays by a distinguished group of international scholars breaks new ground in situating major contemporary British novelists in their respective postcolonial, postmodern, feminist and realist contexts.