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Informationen zum Autor James F. English is Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor, and the Politics of Community in Twentieth-Century Britain (1994) and The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (2005). Klappentext A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction offers an authoritative overview of contemporary British fiction in its social, political, and economic contexts. The book focuses on the fiction that has emerged since the late 1970s, roughly since the start of the Thatcher era, and the resulting transformation of such key areas of literary practice as publishing, bookselling, book reviewing, and higher education. Although the volume's original contributions range across a variety of topics - from the rise and fall of the postcolonial novel, and controversies over the celebrity author, to the changing relationship between literature and the cinema - each of the contributors attends carefully to the institutional and economic contexts of literary production, and to the contending forces that have shaped the emergent canon of contemporary British fiction. A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction will enable students to read any work from the last quarter century of British fiction with a much clearer sense of where it fits within British cultural life. Zusammenfassung A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction offers an authoritative overview of contemporary British fiction in its social! political! and economic contexts. Focuses on the fiction that has emerged since the late 1970s! roughly since the start of the Thatcher era. Comprises original essays from major scholars. Inhaltsverzeichnis Notes on Contributors ix Introduction: British Fiction in a Global Frame 1 James F. English The increasing importance since the 1970s of transnational markets and circuits of exchange, and the consequent repositioning of British fiction in "world literary space." Part I Institutions of Commerce 1 Literary Fiction and the Book Trade 19 Richard Todd The triangulated relation between (i) authors and agents, (ii) publishers, and (iii) retail booksellers, and the rise of the retailers to a position of dominance. 2 Literary Authorship and Celebrity Culture 39 James F. English and John Frow The phenomenon of literary celebrity and its new articulation of the authorial signature with the brand name. Authors considered include Martin Amis, J. K. Rowling, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Fay Weldon. 3 Fiction and the Film Industry 58 Andrew Higson The interaction of contemporary British literature and the cinema, considered as both businesses and cultures. Discusses the full range of novels adapted for the screen, with an extended case study of the adaptation of A. S. Byatt's Possession. Part II Elaborations of Empire 4 Tropicalizing London: British Fiction and the Discipline of Postcolonialism Nico Israel 83 The emergence of postcolonial theory and, subsequently, of a canon of postcolonial novels. Discusses such theorists as Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, and Paul Gilroy, and the novelists Anita Desai, Hari Kunzru, Hanif Kureishi, V. S. Naipaul, Ben Okri, and Salman Rushdie. 5 New Ethnicities, the Novel, and the Burdens of Representation 101 James Procter The shifting relationship between race, writing, and representation from the late 1970s to the present, with particular reference to the work of Monica Ali, Farrukh Dhondy, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, and Zadie Smith. 6 Devolving the Scottish Novel 121 Cairns Craig Contemporary Scottish fiction in the c...
