The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction

How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 2000s shape contemporary British Fiction?

The means of publishing, buying and reading fiction changed dramatically between 2000 and 2010. This volume explores how the socio-political and economic turns of the decade, bookended by the beginning of a millennium and an economic crisis, transformed the act of writing and reading. Detailed chapters look at the writers tracing and shaping the limits of being human through neurological fiction. Attention is given to the reinvigoration of psychogeography as a genre, dealing with the concerns of living in a virtual and globalized world, as well as the effects of reading groups and literary prizes and the reworking of fact and fiction in historical novels.

This major literary assessment of the fiction of the 2000s covers the work of new voices such as Monica Ali, Mark Haddon, Tom McCarthy and Zadie Smith as well as Salman Rushdie, John Banville and Ian McEwan making it an essential contribution to reading, defining and understanding a decade marked by anxieties.

Nick Bentley is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Keele University, UK. He is author of Contemporary British Fiction (2008), Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (2007) and editor of British Fiction of the 1990s (2005).

Nick Hubble is Head of English Literature at Brunel University, UK. He is co-editor of The Science Fiction Handbook (2013) and The 1970s (2014) both published by Bloomsbury.

Leigh Wilson is Principal Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Westminster, UK. She is the author of Modernism (2007) and co-editor of The 1980s (2014) and The 1990s (2015) published by Bloomsbury.

Series Introduction, Nick Hubble (Brunel University, UK), Philip Tew (Brunel University, UK) and Leigh Wilson (University of Westminster, UK)
Volume Introduction, Nick Bentley (Keele University, UK), Nick Hubble (Brunel University, UK) and Leigh Wilson (University of Westminster, UK)
1. Bringing Up the Nation: A British Literary History of the Noughties, Paul McGarry
2. Subcultural Fictions: The representation of youth subcultures in twenty first-century British fiction, Nick Bentley
3. Fictions of the Brain in the 2000s, Laura Salisbury (University of Exeter, UK)
4. Saving Britain: "Ethnic" Writing in the 2000s, Lucienne Loh (University of Liverpool, UK)
5. The Novel as Reference, Leigh Wilson (University of Westminster, UK)
6. The 2000s: Generic Discontinuities & Variations, David James (Queen Mary, University of London, UK)
7. International Contexts I, Tracey K Parker (University of Missouri, USA)
8. International Contexts II: From multicultural enthusiasm to the 'failure of multiculturalism': British multi-ethnic fiction in an international frame, Ulrike Tancke (Johannes Gutenberg Universitat Mainz, Germany)
9. International Contexts III
10. International Contexts IV
Timeline
Brief Biographies
Bibliography
Index