Utopia and the contemporary British novel

by Edwards, Caroline

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Title Statements

Full title :Utopia and the contemporary British novel / Caroline Edwards.

Summary

This book examines the experience of time functions in a specific set of British novels to reveal the persistence of the utopian imagination in the twenty-first century. Through close textual analysis, Edwards develops a new strategy of reading such anticipatory 'fictions of the not yet', including novels by Hari Kunzru, Maggie Gee, David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Jim Crace, Joanna Kavenna, Grace McCleen, Jon McGregor, and Claire Fuller. Read in the context of the philosophical category of non-contemporaneity, these novels reveal a significant new direction in twenty-first-century fiction. Their formal inventiveness and suggestively non-mimetic encounters with otherwise realist narrative representations of contemporary experience open up a realm of utopian possibility that shines through in moments of temporal alterity: glimpses of the future, redeemed strands of past hopes, and alternative social worlds already alive in the present.

Edition Statements

Publication Date:2019.

Publication Statements

Publisher(s):Cambridge University Press
Place of Publication:Cambridge
Language:eng
Publication Date:2019.

Notes

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Jul 2019).

The Physical Object

Description:1 online resource (x, 267 pages) : : PDF file(s).

Edition Identifiers

ISBN:9781108595568, 1108595561
oclc:on1136474611
LC Classification:PR890.T5
Dewey Decimal:823/.91409

1. Introduction | daily into the blue -- 2. Reading fictions of the not yet -- 3. Death | moments of possibility -- Giving voice to the dead: Ali Smith's hotel world -- Miraculous cosmological time: Grace McCleen's The land of decoration -- Arresting the time of death: Jon McGregor's If nobody speaks of remarkable things -- 4. Transmigration | networking utopian times -- Towards a networked art form: Hari Kunzru's Gods without men -- A matryoshka doll of painted moments: David Mitchell's Cloud atlas and The bone clocks -- 'A moment of gory apotheosis': birth as a wormhole in time in Joanna Kavenna's The birth of love -- 5. Apocalypse | co-evolutionary futures -- An ambiguous pastoral epiphany: Claire Fuller's Our endless numbered days -- The problem of temporal exteriority: Maggie Gee's the flood -- The present as history: Jim Crace's The pesthouse -- Epilogue | world as home.

Subjects

Criticism, interpretation, etc English fiction English fiction -- History and criticis… Roman anglais -- Histoire et critique -… Temps dans la littérature Time in literature utopian literature Utopias in literature Utopies -- Dans la littérature