Concise Companion To Contemporary British Fiction

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.


• Topics range from the rise and fall of the postcolonial novel to controversies over the celebrity author.


• The emphasis is on the whole fiction scene, from bookstores and prizes to the changing economics of film adaptation.


• Enables students to read contemporary works of British fiction with a much clearer sense of where they fit within British cultural life.

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).

Notes on Contributors.

Introduction: British Fiction in a Global Frame (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 (Richard Todd).

2. Literary Authorship and Celebrity Culture (James F. English and John Frow).

3. Fiction and the Film Industry (Andrew Higson).

Part II: Elaborations of Empire.

4. Tropicalizing London: British Fiction and the Discipline of Postcolonialism (Nico Israel).

5. New Ethnicities, the Novel, and the Burdens of Representation (James Procter).

6. Devolving the Scottish Novel (Cairns Craig).

7. Northern Irish Fiction: Provisional and Pataphysicians (John Brannigan).

Part III: Mutations of Form.

8. The Historical Turn in British Fiction (Suzanne Keen).

9. The Woman Writer and the Continuities of Feminism (Patricia Waugh).

10. Queer Fiction: the Ambiguous Emergence of a Genre (Robert L. Caserio).

11. The Demise of Class Fiction (Dominic Hedad).

12. What the Porter Saw: On the Academic Novel (Bruce Robbins).

Index.