London in Contemporary British Fiction: The City Beyond the City

271 Pages·2016·2.19 MB·English

by  Nick Hubble

London in Contemporary
British Fiction
Bloomsbury Studies in the City Series Editors: Lawrence Phillips, Regent’s
University London, UK; Matthew Beaumont, Senior Lecturer in English,
University College London, UK.
Editorial Board: Professor Rachel Bowlby (University College London, UK);
Professor Brycchan Carey (Kingston University London, UK); Professor Susan
Alice Fischer (City University of New York, USA); Professor Pamela Gilbert
(University of Florida, USA); Professor Richard Lehan (University of
California, USA); Professor John McLeod (University of Leeds, UK); Alex
Murray, Lecturer (Queen’s University Belfast, UK ); Professor Deborah Epstein
Nord (Princeton University, USA); Professor Douglas Tallack (University of
Leicester, UK); Professor Philip Tew (Brunel University London, UK);
Professor David Trotter (University of Cambridge, UK); Professor Judith
Walkowitz (Johns Hopkins University, USA); Professor Julian Wolfreys
(University of Portsmouth, UK).
The history of literature is tied to the city. From Aeschylus to Addison,
Baudelaire to Balzac, Conrad to Coetzee and Dickens to Dostoevsky, writers
make sense of the city and shape modern understandings through their
reflections and depictions. The urban is a fundamental aspect of a substantial
part of the literary canon that is frequently not considered in and of itself because
it is so prevalent.
Bloomsbury Studies in the City captures the best contemporary criticism on
urban literature and culture. Reading literature, film, drama and poetry in their
historical and social context and alongside urban and spatial theory, this series
explores the impact of the city on writers and their work.
Titles in the Series:
New Suburban Stories Edited by Martin Dines and Timotheus Vermeulen Irish
Writing London: Volumes 1 and 2
Edited by Tom Herron
London in Contemporary British Literature Edited by Nick Hubble and Philip
Tew
Salman Rushdie’s Cities Vassilena Parashkevova
G. K. Chesterton, London and Modernity Edited by Matthew Beaumont and
Matthew Ingleby Brooklyn Fictions: The Contemporary Urban Community in a
Global Age James Peacock
Iain Sinclair: Noise, Neoliberalism and the Matter of London Niall Martin
London in Contemporary
British Fiction
The City Beyond the City
Edited by
Nick Hubble and Philip Tew
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Contents
Acknowledgements
Contributors
Introduction: Parallax London
Nick Hubble and Philip Tew
1 Exploring London in Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005): Trauma and the
Traumatological, Identity Politics and Vicarious Victimhood
Philip Tew
2 Seeing ‘The Empty Space’: Ali Smith’s The Accidental
Susan Alice Fischer
3 Delineating the Liminal in Illimitable London: Will Self’s The Book
of Dave and the Cockney Visionary
Sebastian Jenner
4 The Changingman: Masculinity, Violence and Revenge in Martin
Amis’s Yellow Dog
Nick Bentley
5 Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Sacredness of Space and Time
Tomasz Niedokos
6 Viewing Art in London’s Museums: Ekphrasis in Selected Fiction by
Julian Barnes, A. S. Byatt and Peter Ackroyd
Doris Bremm
7 Iain Sinclair: Complexity, Imagination and the Re-Enchanted Margins
of London Orbital
Laura Colombino
8 Feeling London Globally: The Location of Affect in White Teeth
Jung Su
9 Agency and Conflict in Andrea Levy’s Polyphonic London
Anja Müller-Wood
10 The Liminality of Underground London
Nora Pleßke
11 The Un-, Ab-and Alter-Londons of China Miéville: Imaginary Spaces
for Concrete Subjects
Mark P. Williams
12 Common People: Class, Gender and Social Change in the London
Fiction of Virginia Woolf, John Sommerfield and Zadie Smith
Nick Hubble
Index
Acknowledgements
Some of these chapters are developed from papers given at the seventh annual
Literary London conference, ‘Liminal London: Country/City, Work/Leisure,
Past/Future, and States Between’, organised by Brycchan Carey, Nick Hubble,
Lawrence Phillips and Philip Tew; hosted by the Brunel Centre for
Contemporary Writing (BCCW) and the Department of English at Brunel
University from 2 to 4 July 2008 with financial support from the British
Academy. We are grateful to the Literary London organisation and the British
Academy for this support.
We would like to thank all our contributors for their expertise, patience and
generosity when responding to our queries and guidance as this book has
gradually taken shape. We have enjoyed excellent support throughout from the
editorial team at Bloomsbury, especially David Avital and Mark Richardson,
who have been instrumental in bringing this book to fruition. We would also like
to mention the staff at Brunel University Library, the British Library, the
National Library of Wales and other research libraries who have provided
support to the contributors to this volume.
An earlier version of parts of Laura Colombino’s chapter first appeared in her
book, Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature: Writing, Architecture
and the Body published by Routledge in 2013.
Contributors
Nick Bentley is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Keele University in the
UK. His main research interests are in post-1945 British literature and literary
and cultural theory. He is author of Martin Amis: Writers and Their Work
(Northcote House, 2015); Contemporary British Fiction (Edinburgh University
Press, 2008); Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (Peter Lang,
2007); editor of British Fiction of the 1990s (Routledge, 2005), and co-editor of
The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction in The Decades Series
(Continuum, 2015). He has also published journal articles and book chapters on
Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Doris Lessing, Colin MacInnes,
Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Sam Selvon, Alan Sillitoe, the city in postmodern
fiction, fictional representations of youth subcultures and working-class writing.
He is currently working on two books: Contemporary British Fiction: A
Reader’s Guide to the Essential Criticism; and Making a Scene: Youth
Subcultures in Postwar and Contemporary Fiction.
Doris Bremm received her PhD in Twentieth-Century Studies from the
University of Florida. She is area coordinator for literature and culture at the
Familienbildungsstätte Bonn, Germany. In her research, she specializes in
contemporary literature, intersections between literature and the visual arts, and
literary theory. Her publications include ‘Stream of Consciousness Narration in
James Joyce’s Ulysses: The Flaneur and the Labyrinth in “Lestrygonians” ’ in
The Image of the City in Literature, Media, and Society (eds Will Wright and
Steven Kaplan, Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, 2003),
and three chapters in The English Literature Companion (ed. Julian Wolfreys,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Her book manuscript Representation Beyond
Representation: Reading Paintings in Contemporary Narratives considers
contemporary literature about visual art as a new way to historicize
postmodernism and the postmodern novel. She has won several teaching awards