Contemporary Writers

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These titles are taken from 3 excellent series from Manchester University Press: Contemporary World Writers, Contemporary British Novelists and Contemporary American and Canadian Novelists.

Paul Auster (Contemporary Writers)

This book provides the first extended analysis of Auster’s essays, poetry, fiction, films and collaborative projects. It explores his key themes of identity; language and writing; metropolitan living and community; and storytelling and illusion. By tracing how Auster's representations of New York and city life have matured from a position of urban nihilism to qualified optimism, the book shows how the variety of forms he works in influences the treatment of his central concerns. The chapters are organised around gradually extending spaces to reflect the way in which Auster’s work broadens its focus, beginning with the poet’s room and finishing with the global metropolis of New York: his home city and often his muse. The book uses Auster’s published and unpublished literary essays to explain the shifts from the dense and introspective poems of the 1970s, through the metropolitan fictions of the 1980s and early 1990s, to the relatively optimistic and critically acclaimed films, and his return to fiction in recent years. Author: Mark Brown. (224 pages)
Contents: 1. Rooms; 2. Streets; 3. Downtown; 4. Out of Town; 5. No Place; 6. The Global Metropolis
Level: Library/Depot/Student's papers

9780719073977

J.G. Ballard (Contemporary Writers)

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This book offers a comprehensive account of the work of J.G. Ballard, regarded by critics as one of the most significant fiction writers of recent times. Ballard’s early science fiction writing earned him plaudits as one of the most innovative and individual voices in the field, but his development as a writer has taken him far beyond the confines of any single genre. This book traces Ballard’s career from his early science fiction short stories and novels to his most recent work, particularly his reflections on the role of violence in contemporary social life. It argues that Ballard’s writing is characterised by a distinctive vision of the post-war world and its possible futures, and suggests that his far-reaching analyses of the present age make him one of the indispensable commentators of our time. Author: Andrzej Gasiorek. (240 pages)
Contents: Introduction: Terrestrial and psychic landscapes; 1. Cryptic alphabets; 2. Deviant logics; 3. Uneasy pleasures; 4. The destructive element; 5. Exhausted futures; Coda: Violence and psychopathology; End notes; Bibliography
Level: Library/Depot/Student's papers

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Pat Barker (Contemporary Writers)

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Pat Barker is principally known for her Regeneration trilogy, the last volume of which, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize in 1995. This book provides a comprehensive account and critical analysis of her literary career. It offers readings of Barker's innovations in narrative form, her revisionist perspectives on history, class and gender, and her preoccupation with themes of trauma, haunting and terror. It also analyses the reasons for her success and significance as a novelist. The chapters draw on contemporary theories of critical realism, gender and social identities, memory and narrative, in order to outline the debates with which Barker's work has consistently engaged. Brannigan argues that Barker is one of the most important writers in modern English literary history. Author: John Brannigan. (208 pages)
Contents: Chronology; 1. Critical and cultural contexts; 2. Small worlds: Union Street; 3. Whoever fights monsters: Blow Your House Down; 4. Telling stories: The Century’s Daughter (Liza’s England); 5. Searching for heroes: The Man Who Wasn’t There; 6. History and haunting: The Regeneration Trilogy; 7. The return of history: Another World; 8. Redemption: Border Crossing and Double Vision; 9. Critical overview and conclusion; Notes; Select bibliography
Level: Library/Depot/Student's papers

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Douglas Coupland (Contemporary Writers)

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This book is the first full-length study of Douglas Coupland, one of the twenty-first century’s most innovative and influential novelists. The study explores the prolific first decade-and-a-half of Coupland’s career, from Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) to JPod (2006), a period in which he published ten novels and four significant volumes of non-fiction. Emerging in the last decade of the twentieth century – amidst the absurd contradictions of instantaneous global communication and acute poverty – Coupland’s novels, short stories, essays and visual art have intervened in specifically contemporary debates regarding authenticity, artifice and art. This book explores Coupland’s response, in ground-breaking novels such as Microserfs, Girlfriend in a Coma and Miss Wyoming, to some of the most pressing issues of our times. What place do conventional novels have in an era that has invested so heavily — literally and figuratively — in electronic media and the spectacular forms of film and television? How can 'story' continue to be important for a culture that seems plot-less? Is authentic experience available in a culture saturated with simulation and replication? Why does religious language hold such attraction for contemporary writers? This study is structured around thematically focused chapters that consider Coupland’s engagement with narrative, consumer culture, space, religion and ideas of the future. Author: Andrew Tate. (192 pages)
Contents: 1. Introduction: Coupland's contexts; 2. 'Denarration' or Getting a Life: Coupland and narrative; 3. 'I am not a Target Market': Coupland consumption and junk culture; 4. Nowhere, anywhere, somewhere: Coupland and space; 5. 'You are the first generation raised without religion': Coupland and postmodern spirituality; 6. Conclusion: JPod and the future
Level: Library/Depot/Student's papers

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Kazuo Ishiguro (Contemporary Writers)

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It is a long way from Nagasaki to Number Ten Downing Street. Yet this is precisely the unpredictable path Kazuo Ishiguro has travelled, he was born in the former, and his portrait now hangs in the latter. The Remains of the Day won the Booker Prize in 1989, and confirmed Ishiguro's status as one of Britain's leading writers. This study offers a close-reading of this much-loved novel, and considers all of Ishiguro's work from A Pale View of the Hills (1982) to When We Were Orphans (2000), including his short stories and television plays. How Japanese is Ishiguro? What role does memory and unreliability play in his narratives? Why was The Unconsoled (1995) perceived to be such a radical break from the earlier novels? In addressing these questions, Lewis explores the centrality of dignity and displacement in Ishiguro's vision, and examines the concepts of of home and homelessness in his fictions. Author: Barry Lewis. (208 pages)
Contents: Chronology; contexts and intertexts; a pale view of hills; an artist of the floating world; The Remains of the Day; The Unconsoled; critical overview; postscript on When We Were Orphans.
Level: Library/Depot/Student's papers

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Hanif Kureishi (Contemporary Writers)

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In this critical study of Kureishi's work Bart Moore-Gilbert provides a detailed account of his work to date, putting Kureishi's work in its historical, social, cultural and critical contexts, and providing detailed readings of all the major works. He looks at the characteristic Kureishi themes: colonialism, multi-culturalism, changing conceptions of gender and sexuality, globalization and relations between popular culture and the canon. Author: Bart Moore-Gilbert (272 pages)
Contents: Chronology; 1. Contexts and intertexts; 2. The plays; 3. The films; 4. The novels; 5. Recent work; 6. Critical overview and conclusion

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David Malouf (Contemporary Writers)

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This comprehensive study situates Malouf within the field of contemporary international and postcolonial writing, but without losing sight of the author's affiliation with Australian contexts. The book finds the unity of his work in the continuity of his ethical concerns: for Malouf, human lives find their value in transformations, specifically in instances of self-overcoming that encounters with difference or otherness provoke. The book provides readers with a broad-based understanding of how Malouf's works have been received and assessed. Malouf's poetry receives chapter-length attention; but the main centre of attention is the prose fiction that is the basis of Malouf's current international reputation. Randall measures each work's specific concerns and achievements, but also situates each in the process of Malouf's development, which is shown to be quite remarkably continuous and cumulative. The criticism reveals Malouf's distinctive contribution to key topics that have given shape to contemporary literary studies. Malouf explores the making of subjectivity, focusing on the role of the other, of place, of language, of memory and history. Author: Don Randall. (240 pages)
Contents: 1. Contexts and intertexts; 2. The poetry; 3. The narratives of 'I': Johnno – An Imaginary Life – Child's Play – 12 Edmondstone Street; 4. Multiple worlds: Fly Away Peter – Harland's Half Acre; 5. The Great World; 6. Remembering Babylon; 7. The Conversations at Curlow Creek; 8. The short stories; 9. Critical overview and conclusion
Level: Library/Depot/Student's papers

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Ian McEwan (Contemporary Writers)

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In this survey Ian McEwan emerges as one of those rare writers whose works have received both popular and critical acclaim. His novels are bestsellers, yet he is well regarded by critics, both as a stylist and as a serious thinker about the function and capacities of narrative fiction. McEwan’s novels treat issues that are central to our times: politics, and the promotion of vested interests; male violence and the problem of gender relations; science and the limits of rationality; nature and ecology; love and innocence; and the quest for an ethical worldview. Yet he is also an economical stylist: McEwan’s readers are called upon to attend, not just to the grand themes, but also to the precision of his spare writing. Although McEwan’s later works are more overtly political, more humane, and more ostentatiously literary than the early work, this book uncovers the continuity as well as the sense of evolution through the oeuvre. The case is made for McEwan’s prominence – pre-eminence, even – in the canon of contemporary British novelists. Author: Dominic Head. (240 pages)
Contents: 1. Introduction; 2. Shock-Lit: The Short Stories and The Cement Garden; 3. Dreams of captivity: The Comfort of Strangers; 4. Towards the 'Implicate Order': The Child in Time; 5. Unravelling the binaries: The Innocent and Black Dogs; 6. 'A Mess of Our Own Unmaking': Enduring Love; 7. Amsterdam: McEwan's 'Spoiler'; 8. 'The Wild and Inward Journey of Writing': Atonement; 9. 'Accidents of Character and Circumstance': Saturday; 10. Conclusion: McEwan and the 'Third Culture'
Level: Library/Depot/Student's papers

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Toni Morrison (Contemporary Writers)

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An introduction to Toni Morrison's fiction, this text focuses on its engagement with African-American history and the way the traumas of the past shape Morrison's work. It approaches Morrison's fiction as a form of cultural memory concerned with obscured or erased history, and argues that Morrison sees African-American history — from the times of slavery to the continued racial oppressions of the 20th century — as a history of traumatic experience, and explores how this powerful storyteller bears witness to a painful yet enlivening past. Morrison's novels are known for their lyric power, but they often dwell on scenes of horror, and this text emphasizes the uneasy relations of memory, pain and pleasure in literature. Author: Jill Matus. (224 pages)
Contents: Contexts and intertexts; anger and shame in The Bluest Eye; Sula – war and peace traumas; Song of Solomon – raising dead fathers; Tar Baby – a message mailed from under the sink; Beloved – the possessions of history; "a sweettooth for pain" – history, trauma and replay in Jazz; critical overview.
Level: Library/Depot/Student's papers

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Salman Rushdie (Contemporary Writers)

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Salman Rushdie is a self-proclaimed controversialist, capable of exciting radically divergent viewpoints, a novelist of imaginative range and power, and a fearless commentator upon the state of global politics today. This critical study examines the intellectual, biographical, literary and cultural contexts from which Rushdie's fiction springs in order to help the reader make sense of the often complex debates that surround his life and work. It offers critical readings of all Rushdie's novels, from Grimus through to Shalimar the Clown. Among the subjects considered in this study are: the intellectual and theoretical basis of Rushdie's political thought, his use of the English language, his engagement with the established literary traditions of East and West, his involvement with diverse literary and film genres (including science fiction, satire and tragedy), his analysis of the interlinked processes of globalisation and mass-migration, and his relationship with the current debates about postcolonialism and postmodernism. Author: Andrew Teverson. (256 pages)
Contents: 1. Contexts and intertexts; 2. From science fiction to history: Grimus and Midnight's Children; 3. Tragedy in Shame; 4. Satire in The Satanic Verses; 5. Pessoptimistic fictions: Haroun and the Sea of Stories and The Moor's Last Sigh; 6. The pop novel in the age of globalisation: The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury; 7. Critical overview and conclusion; Afterword: Shalimar the Clown
Level: Library/Depot/Student's papers

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Graham Swift (Contemporary Writers)

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This book offers an accessible critical introduction to the work of Graham Swift, one of Britain’s most significant contemporary authors. Through detailed readings of his novels and short stories from The Sweet Shop Owner (1980) to The Light of Day (2003), this study addresses Swift's key themes of history, loss, masculinity and ethical redemption. It proposes that one of the side-effects of modernity has been the destruction of traditional pathways of self and collective belief, leading to a loss of understanding between individuals about their duties to each other and to society. Swift's writing returns repeatedly to the question of what we can believe in when all the established markers of identity – family, community, gender, profession, history – have become destabilised? The author suggests that Swift increasingly moves towards a notion of redemption through a lived ethical practice as the only means of finding solace in a world lacking a central symbolic authority. Author: Daniel Lea (224 pages)
Contents: 1. Introduction: Lost in transmission; 2. The Sweet Shop Owner (1980); 3. Shuttlecock (1981) and Learning to Swim and Other Stories (1982); 4. Waterland (1983); 5. Out of this World (1988); 6. Ever After (1992); 7. Last Orders (1996); 8. The Light of Day (2003); Notes; Select Bibliography
Level: Library/Depot/Student's papers

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Amy Tan (Contemporary Writers)

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This is the most comprehensive study to date of Amy Tan’s work. It offers close readings of her texts in the context of broader debates about the representation of identity, history and reality. In contrast with Tan’s own American-born narrators, and mainstream critics, Bella Adams’s study looks beyond the stereotypes which appear in Tan’s books, and explores the ways in which Chinese immigrants and their American relatives struggle to understand each others’ ‘best qualities’, via the Chinese tradition of the ‘talk story’. She emphasises Tan’s American narrators’ process of becoming Chinese and discovering ‘real China’, and the significance of the ironic staging of these moments. Students will find this study both accessible and probing. Author: Bella Adams. (232 pages)
Contents: Chronology; 1. Contexts and intertexts; 2. The Joy Luck Club; 3. The Kitchen God’s Wife; 4. The Hundred Secret Senses; 5. The Bonesetter’s Daughter; 6. Critical overview and conclusion; Notes; Select bibliography
Level: Library/Depot/Student's papers

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Irvine Welsh (Contemporary Writers)

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Irvine Welsh’s fiction has defined an era, and this first full-length study provides a textual and contextual analysis of all his work, from Trainspotting and The Acid House to Glue and Porno. A detailed chronological survey also considers the appropriateness of cultural, postmodern and postcolonial theories to Welsh’s fiction. The reader is given a fascinating insight into the writer’s formal and political ambitions, placing him in the context of the ‘brat pack’ which exploded onto the Scottish literary scene in the 1990s. He explores the social, class and political conditioning of Welsh’s early life, and its impact on his motivations for writing. This is a clearly written and accessible resource for students. Author: Aaron Kelly. (256 pages)
Contents: Introduction: Irvine Welsh and the ‘long dark night of late capitalism’; 1. Trainspotting (1993); 2. The Acid House (1994); 3. Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995); 4. Ecstasy (1996); 5. Filth (1998); 6. Glue (2001); 7. Porno (2002); Conclusion: Plotting against power or scheming against the working class?; Bibliography
Level: Library/Depot/Student's papers

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Jeanette Winterson (Contemporary Writers)

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This is the first full-length study of Jeanette Winterson’s work as a whole, containing in-depth analyses of her eight novels and cross-references to her minor fictional and non-fictional works. The study establishes the formal, thematic and ideological characteristics of the novels and situates the writer within the general panorama of contemporary British fiction. Earlier critics usually approached Winterson exclusively either as a key lesbian novelist, or as a heavily experimental and ‘arty’ writer, whose works are unnecessarily difficult and meaningless. By contrast, this book provides a comprehensive, ‘vertical’ analysis of the novels. It combines the study of formal issues – such as narrative structure, point of view, perspective, and the handling of narrative and story time – with the thematic analysis of character types, recurrent topoi, intertextual and generic allusions, etc., focused from various analytical perspectives – narratology, lesbian and feminist theory, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, myth criticism etc. Novels that read superficially, appear simple and realistic are revealed as complex linguistic artifacts with a convoluted structure and clogged with intertextual echoes of earlier writers and works. The conclusions show the inseparability of form and meaning (for example, the fact that all the novels have a spiralling structure reflects the depiction of self as fluid and of the world as a multiverse) and place Winterson within the trend of postmodernist British writers with a visionary outlook on art, such as Maureen Duffy and Peter Ackroyd. Author: Susana Onega. (272 pages)
Contents: Introduction; 1. Of priests and prophets; 2. History and storytelling; 3. The art of love; 4. Multiple selves and worlds; 5. Only connect; Conclusion.
Level: Library/Depot/Student's papers

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