Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1107006910 ISBN 13: 9781107006911

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2013

The widespread use of electronic communication at the dawn of the twenty-first century has created a global context for our interactions, transforming the ways we relate to the world and to one another. This critical introduction reads the fiction of the past decade as a response to our contemporary predicament - one that draws on new cultural and technological developments to challenge established notions of democracy, humanity, and national and global sovereignty. Peter Boxall traces formal and thematic similarities in the novels of contemporary writers including Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, W. G. Sebald, and Philip Roth, as well as David Mitchell, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dave Eggers, Ali Smith, Amy Waldman, and Roberto Bolaņo. In doing so, Boxall maps new territory for scholars, students, and interested readers of today's literature by exploring how these authors narrate shared cultural life in the new century.

Book Description:

This is the first full-length study of the twenty-first century novel. It examines writers from around the world and identifies the formal and thematic features that their novels share, suggesting the outlines of a new phase in the genre's history.

About the Author:

Peter Boxall is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He has published widely on modern and contemporary literature, including the recent books Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction (2006), Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism (2009) and 1001 Books You Must Read before You Die, 5th edition (2012).