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  1. Home
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  3. Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel
  • Cited by 15
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
July 2019
Print publication year:
2019
Online ISBN:
9781108595568
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108595568
Subjects:
Literature, Literary Theory, English Literature after 1945
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture (3)
Information

Book description

This book examines the experience of time functions in a specific set of British novels to reveal the persistence of the utopian imagination in the twenty-first century. Through close textual analysis, Edwards develops a new strategy of reading such anticipatory 'fictions of the not yet', including novels by Hari Kunzru, Maggie Gee, David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Jim Crace, Joanna Kavenna, Grace McCleen, Jon McGregor, and Claire Fuller. Read in the context of the philosophical category of non-contemporaneity, these novels reveal a significant new direction in twenty-first-century fiction. Their formal inventiveness and suggestively non-mimetic encounters with otherwise realist narrative representations of contemporary experience open up a realm of utopian possibility that shines through in moments of temporal alterity: glimpses of the future, redeemed strands of past hopes, and alternative social worlds already alive in the present.

Reviews

'Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel is an ambitious, engaging and original book. Edwards shows how the twenty-first century is experiencing a Renaissance of experimentalism that reconsiders time and temporal experience in imaginative fictions. This book will definitely make a mark, reinvigorating the utopian philosophy of Ernst Bloch and providing a persuasive way of reading the evident preoccupation with the temporal and the possibility of recovering political hope in dark times that is evident across so much contemporary writing.'

Patricia Waugh - Durham University

'Combining wide-ranging theoretical sophistication with acute analyses of particular fictional texts, Caroline Edwards’s book should be of great interest not only to those with a special concern with the current British novel but also to everyone who wishes to understand how the utopian imagination can operate in an era when so many seem to have lost hope. Perhaps no one in the UK today is doing more than Edwards to demonstrate the permanent indispensability of the philosophy of Ernst Bloch.'

Carl Freedman - William A. Read Professor of English Literature, Louisiana State University

‘Edwards offers a convincing analysis of how contemporary British Fiction has drawn upon the resources of [science fiction] and other non-mimetic devices in order to prise open the utopian potentials within the present moment … an essential book for [science fiction] readers …’

Paul March Russel Source: Foundation

‘Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel succeeds in providing a substantial account of dominant aesthetic and philosophical traits in contemporary literary fiction as well as in utilizing utopianism as a mode of the not yet that can productively inform a postclassical approach to narratology that accounts for the complexities of the experience of time in the twenty-first century. Among the recent book-length contributions to utopian theorizing, it is one of the best and most substantial. … It is a book that will resonate with scholars and students who are interested in utopianism and futures studies from a range of subdisciplines, including literary studies, philosophy, cultural and media studies.’

Mark Schmitt Source: Utopian Studies

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