ENGL 53.42 Postmodern" Britain: Fictions of Pluralism, Dystopia (and Brexit)

Contemporary Britain can be seen as a divided state: leave versus remain, cosmopolitan urbanism against conservative rural communities, post-imperial malaise and the rise of global Anglophone influence. Britain is also a literary hotbed, home to the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and an arena in which cultural production (and social debates) still take the form of narrative. What is “Britain” at the start of the twenty-first century, in what is ostensibly a post-war, post-imperial, and post-modern era? How do fiction writers respond to the twin pulls of national nostalgia and multicultural, intersectional identities? How do experiments in narrative form and genre speak to the emergence of new social and political formations? How does contemporary British fiction adapt or respond to a longer (and well-established) lineage of UK novelists (from Austen and Dickens to Virginia Woolf)? This course focuses on British fiction published after 1980, including works by authors who identify as Black British, queer, feminist, Muslim, and immigrant. Possible authors include Zadie Smith, A. S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, Sarah Waters, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson, and Hanif Kureishi.

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Dist:LIT; WCult:W

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Department-Specific Course Categories

Course Group III