Contemporary Crisis Fictions: Affect and Ethics in the Modern British Novel

274 Pages·2014·1 MB·English

by  Emily Horton (auth.)

Contemporary Crisis Fictions
Also by Emily Horton
ALI SMITH (ed. with Monica Germanà)
THE 1980S: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction
(ed. with Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson)
Contemporary Crisis
Fictions
Affect and Ethics in the Modern British
Novel
Emily Horton
© Emily Horton 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-35019-0
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To Andrew
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Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction: Contemporary Crisis Fiction: A New Approach to
the Writing of Graham Swift, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro 1
1 Contemporary Crisis Fiction: Constructing a New Genre 32
2 Curiosity and Civilisation: Reappraisals of History in
the Fiction of Graham Swift 55
3 Reassessing the Two-Culture Debate: Popular Science in
the Fiction of Ian McEwan 107
4 Shifting Perspectives and Alternate Landscapes: Culture
and Cultural Politics in the Fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro 159
Epilogue: A Review of Contemporary Crisis Fiction with
an Emphasis on Overlap Between the Works at
a Discursive Level 217
Notes 235
Bibliography 243
Index 257
vii
Acknowledgements
I would particularly like to thank Dominic Head (University of
Nottingham), without whose guidance and enthusiasm for this project
I would never have been able to write this. A special thanks also to Sean
Matthews (University of Nottingham) and David James (Queen Mary’s
College, University of London), who have offered much needed advice
and encouragement on this project – David in particular in the final
stages of editing.
I am immensely grateful to Monica Germanà (University of West-
minster), Heather Lilley (University of Greenwich), and Sebastian Groes
(University of Roehampton) for their on-going friendship, guidance and
support in finishing this book. Likewise, I am indebted to my colleagues
from the various universities where I have worked as a visiting lecturer,
including Leigh Wilson and Andrew Caink (University of Westminster),
Philip Tew, Nick Hubble, and Jago Morrison (Brunel University), and
Mark Mathuray (Royal Holloway, University of London). Thanks also
to Lucienne Loh (University of Liverpool) for her on-going support and
insight into the art of contemporary fiction, as well as to Emily Wilczek
(University of Lincoln), Jane Price, and Elaine Hudson.
A final thanks goes to my family and especially to Andrew Smith, who
has shown incredible patience throughout this long project, and whose
love, reassurance and inspiration is without match.
viii
Introduction
Contemporary Crisis Fiction: A New Approach
to the Writing of Graham Swift, Ian McEwan
and Kazuo Ishiguro
Graham Swift, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro are three of the most
important writers to have emerged on the British literary scene since
the 1970s. To some extent, this significance has not gone unnoticed.
It is evidenced, for example, by their consistent appearance in critical
books on contemporary literature, including Rod Mengham’s 1999 An
Introduction to Contemporary Fiction, Dominic Head’s 2002 The Cambridge
Introduction to Modern British Fiction, Jago Morrison’s 2003 Contemporary
Fiction and Philip Tew’s 2004 The Contemporary British Novel, as well as
by a good deal of secondary material surrounding each of their work
individually. At the moment, there are at least four comprehensive
studies of each author alone. Likewise, from the seventies onwards,
essays and reviews on their fiction have appeared regularly in literary
magazines and journals, including Times Literary Supplement, London
Review of Books, The New Review, Granta and Critique. All have also been
recipients of numerous literary prizes, including the prestigious Booker
Prize: Ishiguro for The Remains of the Day in 1989; Swift for Last Orders
in 1996; McEwan for Amsterdam in 1998.
Despite these various academic and popular accolades however,
relatively little has been said in relation to the shared social and ethi-
cal dimensions of these writers’ works, dimensions which, I believe,
explain their special contemporary relevance. In response to this criti-
cal gap, the intention of this book is to call attention to this conjoint
of contemporary British writers, presenting their works as key instances
of a new crisis fiction genre particular to the global capitalist context of
post-consensus British life. In a country often understood in terms of its
aggressive individualism, consumer competition and persistent nation-
alism, my claim for these authors is that, in addition to responding to
this problematic context through a common aesthetic of crisis, they
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