Screen LibraryUtopia and the contemporary British novel /
"This book explores the narrative treatment of time from a philosophical perspective. I will be concerned with how the experience of lived time, or temporality, functions in a specific set of British novels to reveal the persistence of the utopian imagination in the twenty-first century. Centra...
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| Main Authors: | |
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| Published: |
Cambridge University Press,
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| Publisher Address: | Cambridge, United Kingdom : |
| Publication Dates: | 2019. |
| Literature type: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Series: |
Cambridge studies in twenty-first century literature and culture
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| Subjects: | |
| Summary: |
"This book explores the narrative treatment of time from a philosophical perspective. I will be concerned with how the experience of lived time, or temporality, functions in a specific set of British novels to reveal the persistence of the utopian imagination in the twenty-first century. Central to this book is the assertion that utopian expression not only persists within the twenty-first-century novel, but is shaping an emerging body of fictions whose shared interrogation of lived and historical time reveals a series of radically nonlinear, disjunct, pluralised and alternative temporal constructions. The writers I have selected for inclusion within this study represent a renaissance of British literary talent in the contemporary period that cuts across different generations." -- |
| Carrier Form: | x, 267 pages ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 239-253) and index. |
| ISBN: |
9781108498708 (hardcover) : 1108498701 (hardcover) 9781108598644 (electronic book) 1108598641 (electronic book) |
| Index Number: | PR890 |
| CLC: | I561.074 |
| Call Number: | I561.074/E262 |
| Contents: | 1. Introduction: daily into the blue -- Ours is a time of profound unevenness -- Of whom and what are we contemporaries? -- Blue: the colour of distance -- A shiver in the spine -- Fictions of the not yet -- Something's missing -- Three horizons: a note on method -- 2. Reading fictions of the not yet -- Reading utopia -- Reading time -- From the contemporary to non-contemporaneity -- 3. Death: moments of possibility -- Utopia and death: an essential relationship? -- The love that is stronger than death -- The dance of death in the loveliest place on earth -- Giving voice to the dead: Ali Smith's Hotel World -- Miraculous cosmological time: Grace McCleen's The Land of Decoration -- Arresting the time of death: Jon McGregor's If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things -- 4. Transmigration: networking utopian times -- Our brief time and the historical time we cannot live -- Networked times -- Towards a networked art form: Hari Kunzru's Gods Without Men -- A matryoshka doll of painted moments: David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks -- 'A moment of gory apotheosis': birth as a wormhole in time in Joanna Kavenna's The Birth of Love -- 5. Apocalypse: co-evolutionary futures -- Natural historical time -- Apocalypse: the arcadian revenge? -- Pastoral post-apocalypticism -- An ambiguous pastoral epiphany: Claire Fuller's Our Endless Numbered Days -- The problem of temporal exteriority: Maggie Gee's The Flood -- The present as history: Jim Crace's The Pesthouse -- 6. Epilogue: world as home -- Joined-up thinking -- The final state of nature. |