Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays Books

The outcome of the first international conference on David Mitchell's writing, this collection of critical essays, focuses on his first three novels - Ghostwritten (1999), number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004) - to provide a sustained analysis of Mitchell's complex narrative techniques and the literary, political and cultural implications of his early work. The essays cover topics ranging from narrative structure, genre and the Bildungsroman to representations of Japan, postmodernism, the construction of identity, utopia, science fiction and postcolonialism. Contents Foreword David Mitchell 1. Introducing David Mitchell’s Universe: A Twenty-First Century House of Fiction Sarah Dillon 2. The Novels in Nine Parts Peter Childs and James Green 3. ‘Or something like that’: Coming of Age in number9dream Kathryn Simpson 4. Remediations of ‘Japan’ in number9dream Baryon Tensor Posadas 5. The Stories We Tell: Discursive Identity Through Narrative Form in Cloud Atlas Courtney Hopf 6. Cloud Atlas: From Postmodernity to the Posthuman Hélène Machinal 7. Cloud Atlas and If on a winter’s night a traveller: Fragmentation and Integrity in the Postmodern Novel Will McMorran 8. ‘Strange Transactions’: Utopia, Transmigration and Time in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas Caroline Edwards 9. Speculative Fiction as Postcolonial: Critique in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas Nicholas Dunlop 10. ‘Moonlight bright as a UFO abduction’: Science Fiction, Present-Future Alienation and Cognitive Mapping William Stephenson Notes on Contributors Index About the Editor Sarah Dillon is Lecturer in Contemporary Fiction in the School of English at the University of St Andrews. She is author of The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (2007) and has published essays on Jacques Derrida, Elizabeth Bowen, H.D., Michel Faber, Maggie Gee and David Mitchell.

The relationship between writer and reader, an unnerving intimacy with a total stranger, remains mysterious. Writing, my body is the locus of illusions that for me, in that moment, are real: scenes, faces, landscapes, flash before my eyes as I record them. My web of words, by now drained of sound and colour, is transmitted to a publisher. (Maggie Gee, Foreword) It is a risky business holding an academic conference, and publishing a collection of academic essays, on Maggie Gee. For Gee is a satirist of the most unflinching kind, and literary scholars and their conferences are mocked throughout her work. Take, for example, Gee’s most recent novel, Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (2014). Woolf – accidentally resurrected from the dead by contemporary writer Angela Lamb – learns that Angela is to attend a Woolf conference in Istanbul and is eager to go along with her. Angela has her doubts: ‘I can hardly take her to her own conference’, she writes to her daughter, Gerda; ‘why not?,’ thinks Gerda, in reply: ‘Wouldn’t it be helpful to have the actual writer telling all the academics and people like my mother where they are gong wrong? Surely it would be good for them’. Gee has a longstanding interest in the role of the author, since her doctoral thesis on self-conscious authors in Nabokov, Beckett and Woolf. Her first published novel Dying, in Other Words (1981), plays out that interest through fiction, in a postmodern self-conscious experimental reflection on the role of the author; her most recent novel addresses the same ideas through two author characters: the contemporary writer Angela Lamb, and the resurrected dead Woolf. This miraculous resurrection provides playful opportunity for further reflection on Roland Barthes’s idea of ‘the death of the author’, a theoretical concept on which Gee wrote in her doctoral thesis. Through our conversations with Gee – both at the conference and in correspondence throughout the years in which this collection has been brought together – we the editors, and our contributors, have no doubt that whilst an author may indeed not know everything about their work, the idea of intentionality is not entirely fallacious. Gee is a clever, careful writer, as well as a skilled scholar (even though she did not choose that path); she knows what she is doing when she is writing and she knows what she intends. At the same time, of course, she is under no illusion that when her fictional work ventures into the world, it will be interpreted in various and different ways. Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Foreword Maggie Gee 1. Beyond the Blue: The Sorrowful Joy of Gee Sarah Dillon and Caroline Edwards 2. Burning to Tell the Tale: Negotiating Aesthetics and Politics in The Burning Book Monika Szuba 3. Reproductive Politics and the Public Sphere: Natalism, Natality and Apocalypse Alex Beaumont 4. 'Fall[ing] Out of the Past': Time, Ageing and Generations in Where Are the Snows Sarah Falcus 5. Literary Equivocation: Reproductive Futurism and The Ice People Sarah Dillon 6. 'One and Indivisible, A Seamless Web': Climate Change as Historical Process in The Flood Chris Maughan 7. 'The End Times and After': Utopia, Dystopia and Being-Together in The Flood Adam Welstead 8. From the 'Native Outside' to the 'Foreign Within': Re/negotiating Urban Space in The White Family Irene Pérez Fernández 9. Faith and Grace: Maggie Gee s Spritual Politics Susan Alice Fischer 10. The Resurrection of the Author: On Virginia Woolf in Manhattan E. H. Wright 11. How May I Speak in My Own Voice? Language and the Forbidden Maggie Gee Notes on Contributors Index

A major critical engagement with a major contemporary writer: absolutely essential reading. --Adam Roberts, author of New Model Army (2010), Jack Glass (2012) and Bête (2014), and winner of the British Science Fiction Award This critical anthology, the first devoted exclusively to the works of China Miéville, sets a high standard for the other such volumes that will surely follow. All the chapters in this collection should be highly recommended to the large and growing number of readers who rightly regard Miéville as one of the pre-eminent imaginative writers of the 21st century. --Carl Freedman, Russell B. Long Professor of English at Louisiana State University and author of Critical Theory and Science Fiction (2000) and Art and Idea in the Novels of China Miéville (2015) An exemplary addition to the Gylphi Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays series, this challenging and fascinating collection is as demanding as its subject. Crucial for those interested in the weird, in science fiction and in the turns of contemporary British fiction. --Robert Eaglestone, Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought, Royal Holloway, University of London Since the publication of his first novel in 1998, China Miéville has distinguished himself as one of the most exciting and inventive writers working in any genre in contemporary British fiction. The author of nine novels and two short story collections to date, as well as comics script-writing, numerous critical works on science fiction, and legal scholarship, Miéville is a critically acclaimed writer who has also achieved popular success. The chapters in this collection respond to the range of interests that have shaped Miéville's fiction from his influential role in contemporary genre debates, to his ability to pose serious philosophical questions about state control, revolutionary struggle, regimes of apartheid, and the function of international law in a globalized world. This collection demonstrates how Miéville's fictions offer a striking example of contemporary literature's ability to imagine alternatives to neoliberal capitalism at a time of crisis for leftist ideas within the political realm.

Each chapter in this collection explores the challenge posed to science fiction, literary fiction and contemporary ideas through Roberts's novels. His use of the science fiction toolkit combined with his sharp and sometimes lyrical prose blurs the distinction that some would wish to maintain between science fiction and mainstream literature. Contents Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations On Being the Object of Critical Scrutiny Adam Roberts New Model Writer Christos Callow Jr. and Anna McFarlane Part I: Alienating Characters The Disassociated Hero Farah Mendlesohn Pax Per Tyrannis: Religious and Political Extremism Exposed via Menippean Satire in the Novels of Adam Roberts Michelle Yost New Model Readers: Changing Critical and Popular Receptions of the Science Fiction of Adam Roberts Niall Harrison Part II: Political Interventions Breaking the Cycle of the Golden Age: Jack Glass and Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy Anna McFarlane On the Topic of Plenty: Sunshine and Ice-Cream Mountains in By Light Alone Catherine Parry Nation-State 2.0: Visions of Europe in Adam Roberts's New Model Army Thomas Wellmann Part III: Ludic Authorship New Model Authors? Authority, Authordom, Anarchism and the Atomized Text in a Networked World Paul Graham Raven Splinter Swiftly: The Hermeneuting Parallax of Adam Roberts's Generic Auteurship Andrew M. Butler Part IV: Intertextual Networks Beyond Brobdingnagians and Bolsheviks: Extra-Textual Readings of Swiftly and Yellow Blue Tibia Glyn Morgan Rule of Law: Reiterating Genre in Jack Glass Paul March-Russell Notes on Contributors Index Reviews It's an excellent idea to gather a book of essays about the work of Adam Roberts. His novels are so various and brilliant that it's a pleasure to discuss them in depth, as it is with the work of any gifted artist following a singular path. This volume clarifies parts of Roberts' project while deepening mysteries elsewhere in it just what one wants from literary criticism. -- Kim Stanley Robinson Adam Roberts has long been regarded as one of contemporary science fiction's most innovative, and overlooked, writers. Adam Roberts: Critical Essays makes an excellent intervention in addressing this critical lacuna, yielding productive insights into the startling inventiveness of his texts, their rich intertextuality, ludic playfulness, and, more recently, political response to a post-Occupy world. Roberts's novels and parodies themselves have much to teach us about the science fiction tradition, and these essays rightfully position his work as among the best of twenty-first-century writing in the speculative mode. --Dr Caroline Edwards, Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature, Birkbeck, University of London Adam Roberts is at once the cleverest and wittiest of contemporary science fiction writers. This dazzling collection of essays shows how cleverness is his topic as well as his technique, and how his wit both mocks and accentuates the prodigious intelligence that marks every page of his work. I haven't read a more perceptive or entertaining tribute to a living author. --Dr Robert Maslen, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of Glasgow When the history of 21st-century science fiction is written, Adam Roberts will be remembered as this era's H. G. Wells. --Damien Walter, Writer, Columnist for The Guardian, Writing teacher.

Rupert Thomson's innovative and unsettling writing ranges from dystopian alternative futures to meditations on crime and cultural memory, and from historical fictions to explorations of contemporary gender violence. The essays in this collection argue that Thomson's novels and memoir are compelling case-studies in late twentieth and early twenty-first-century literature, which engage with contemporary cultural and political preoccupations through persistently off-beat and often experimental literary forms, and trouble stable definitions of genre in the process. With chapters focusing on borders, panopticism, haunting, child sexual abuse, shame, atmosphere and intertextuality, this collection offers a critical introduction to an author whose work has been overlooked by the academy for too long.

Since the appearance of Remainder in 2005, Tom McCarthy has emerged as one of the most significant British novelists of the twenty-first century, with two of his first four novels appearing on the Man Booker shortlist. This collection, the first devoted to McCarthy, offers a breadth of angles on the novels Remainder (2005), Men in Space (2007), C (2010), and Satin Island (2015), placing them in their literary and philosophical contexts, from the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century to the speculative realists of the early twenty-first. The essays cover topics ranging from the roles that geometry, architecture, memory, materiality, and posthumanism play in McCarthy's writing; they consider his relation to modernism and to postmodernism; and they examine his artistic output under the guise of the International Necronautical Society. Reviews This outstanding volume provides authoritative and energetic insights into the work of one of contemporary literature's most idiosyncratic innovators. Under Dennis Duncan's careful editorship, the book rises to the challenge of being the first of its kind devoted to Tom McCarthy's writing, as contributors offer a series of multivalent perspectives on an oeuvre that has impishly evaded categorization. Bringing together timely and adventurous approaches, the collection does full justice to McCarthy's bracing responses to modernism, humanism, realism, and postmodernism. By confronting such paradigms without dismissing them, the chapters here give us the resources for keeping pace with the formal and intellectual development of this extraordinary writer. --David James, Queen Mary, University of London, author of Modernist Futures An indispensable guide to the project of Tom McCarthy, one of contemporary fiction's most exciting voices. Exploring the rich conceptual landscape of McCarthy's work, this wide-ranging collection demonstrates McCarthy's centrality to current critical debates about the legacies of modernism and the avant-garde, the aesthetics of the contemporary, and the philosophical value of the inhuman. Sensitively tuned into McCarthy's strange transmissions, these essays chart a bold course for future encounters with this fascinating writer. --Justus Nieland, Michigan State University About the Author Dennis Duncan is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bodleian Libraries Centre for the Study of the Book and a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, where he is writing a history of the book index. He has published articles on the Oulipo, James Joyce, Mallarmé, and novels with indexes. As a translator he has published work by Michel Foucault, Boris Vian, and Alfred Jarry, as well as a book-length translation of the modernist little magazine Le Grand Jeu. He writes regularly on book history for the TLS, and on the French avant-garde for LIP, the journal of the London Institute of Pataphysics.

This critical collection examines the way in which M. John Harrison has been at the forefront of British speculative fiction, from the New Wave to the New Weird and beyond, excoriating its lumpy prose, refusing its cheap consolations, and reinventing its most debased forms. Along with his depictions of a fallen world, of fragile humanity, entropic landscapes and self-harming trajectories, of transport cafes, moorland peaks and legendary cities, reinvented sword'n'sorcery, space opera and supernatural horror as profound meditations on desire and loss.

Nicola Barker's exuberant novels here receive the scholarly attention they deserve in a collection of essays which moves chronologically through her oeuvre. The chapters are broad-ranging, placing Barker's work in its contemporary context and collectively making a convincing case for her importance as one of our most inventive novelists. Contents Foreword Nicola Barker The Barkeresque Mode: An Introduction Berthold Schoene Indie Style: Reversed Forecast and a Turn-of-the-Century Aesthetic Ben Masters 'Temporary People': Wide Open as an Island Narrative Daniel Marc Janes 'You grew up in this shithole, then?': Literary Geographics and the Thames Gateway Series Len Platt 'The Pair of Opposites Paradox': Ambivalence, Destabilization and Resistance in Five Miles from Outer Hope Ginette Carpenter 'Woah there a moment. Time out!': Slowing Down in Clear: A Transparent Novel Beccy Kennedy Beneath the Thin Veneer of the Modern: Medievalism in Darkmans Christopher Vardy Burley Cross Postbox Theft as Comedy Huw Marsh 'Tuning into My "Awareness Continuum"': Optimized Attention in The Yips Alice Bennett Exuberant Narration as Metaphysical Currency in In the Approaches Berthold Schoene The Pursuit of Happiness in H(A)PPY , or What a Difference an (A) Makes Eleanor Byrne Notes on Contributors Index

This collection of essays provides the first substantial academic study of Faber's body of work from an international range of scholars many of whom include Faber's work in both their research and teaching. Reviews This collected volume offers a fittingly sensitive, creative and diverse range of responses to the complexities of Michel Faber's writings. The essays that make up the collection cover many aspects of Faber's work, including the limits of genre, human/animal relations, gender, language, time and the representation of reality itself. Correspondingly, the volume provides numerous frames and contexts through which to read Michel Faber, offering a substantial insight into the work of this important contemporary writer. --Ben Davies, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of Portsmouth This is a welcome new volume in the Gylphi Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays series. Its coverage of Faber's eclectic and powerful oeuvre is wide-ranging and strong, with the essays deploying a refreshing variety of methodological approaches to his work, and foregrounding a range of voices. It will be an important and useful foundational critical text on the work of this deeply thoughtful and highly skilled contemporary writer. --Sarah Dillon, Lecturer in Literature and Film, University of Cambridge

Sarah Hall’s fame as a writer has been rising steadily since her debut novel, Haweswater , appeared in 2002. With each succeeding novel she has broken new ground and captivated new audiences, and her fifth, The Wolf Border , received international acclaim. The essays in this collection – the first book-length study of Hall’s work to be made available to academic and non-academic readers – bear witness to her originality and versatility. They situate Hall’s work within wider intellectual and literary traditions, British and international contexts, and offer an essential guide to an essential writer. ‘This illuminating collection offers an overdue scholarly appraisal of Sarah Hall’s fictional oeuvre to date. The essays explore questions of genre, style, national and devolutionary politics, feminism, environmentalism, and survival. Particular attention is paid to the creaturely human animals that populate Hall’s fiction and the visceral, subcutaneous vitalism that unspools settled notions of species and subjectivity in her work. Essential reading for anyone with an interest in this important contemporary British writer.’ Caroline Edwards, Birkbeck, University of London ‘In this wide-ranging and comprehensive collection, Beaumont and D’hoker have assembled an impressive range of critics and essays on a writer whose reputation in literary studies has been gradually building over the last two decades … Sarah Hall: Critical Essays will help to cement Hall’s place in the ranks of the best in contemporary literature and achieves what all good literary criticism should – it takes you back to the fiction with fresh eyes and new perspectives.’ Nick Bentley, Keele University