Having emerged as one the leading contemporary British writers, David Mitchell is rapidly taking his place amongst British novelists with the gravitas of an Ishiguro or a McEwan. Written for a wide constituency of readers of contemporary literature, A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell explores Mitchell's main concerns-including those of identity, history, language, imperialism, childhood, the environment, and ethnicity-across the six novels published so far, as well as his protean ability to write in multiple and diverse genres. It places Mitchell in the tradition of Murakami, Sebald, and Rushdie-writers whose works explore narrative in an age of globalization and cosmopolitanism. Patrick O'Donnell traces the through-lines of Mitchell's work from ghostwritten to The Bone Clocks and, with a chapter on each of the six novels, charts the evolution of Mitchell's fictional project.

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A timeless, structure-bending classic that explores how actions of individual lives impact the past, present and future—from a postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in fiction Featuring a new afterword by David Mitchell and a new introduction by Gabrielle Zevin, author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. The novel careens, with dazzling virtuosity, to Belgium in 1931, to the West Coast in the 1970s, to an inglorious present-day England, to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok, and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history. But the story doesn’t end even there. The novel boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, David Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky. As wild as a video game, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.

Having emerged as one the leading contemporary British writers, David Mitchell is rapidly taking his place amongst British novelists with the gravitas of an Ishiguro or a McEwan. Written for a wide constituency of readers of contemporary literature, A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell explores Mitchell's main concerns-including those of identity, history, language, imperialism, childhood, the environment, and ethnicity-across the six novels published so far, as well as his protean ability to write in multiple and diverse genres. It places Mitchell in the tradition of Murakami, Sebald, and Rushdie-writers whose works explore narrative in an age of globalization and cosmopolitanism. Patrick O'Donnell traces the through-lines of Mitchell's work from ghostwritten to The Bone Clocks and, with a chapter on each of the six novels, charts the evolution of Mitchell's fictional project.

The Poetics of Empowerment in David Mitchell’s Novels combines the investigation of David Mitchell’s novels with the introduction of a new critical concept to literary studies: empowerment. Aiming to situate and establish empowerment firmly within the context of literary studies, it offers the first framework and definition for reading fictional texts with the lens of empowerment and applies it in the analysis of discourse, the fictional characters, and the role of the reader in Mitchell’s novels. Drawing on narratological analysis, cognitive approaches to literature, and reader-response theory, it features close readings of Cloud Atlas (2004), Black Swan Green (2006), and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) and dissects the author’s strategies, poetics, and agenda of empowering fiction. This book argues for an inherent, indissoluble connection between empowerment and the telling of stories and demonstrates how literary studies can benefit from a serious engagement with empowerment—and how such an engagement can stimulate new responses to fiction and put literary studies in conversation with other disciplines.

Since the publication of Ghostwritten (1999), David Mitchell has rapidly established himself as one of the most inventive and important British novelists of the 21st century. In this landmark study, Rose Harris-Birtill reveals the extent to which Mitchell has created an interconnected fictional world across the full run of his writing. Covering Mitchell's complete fictions, from bestselling novels such as Cloud Atlas (2004), The Bone Clocks (2014) and number9dream (2001), to his short stories and his libretti for the operas Sunken Garden and Wake, this book examines how Buddhist influences inform the ethical worldview that permeates his writing. Using a comparative theoretical model drawn from the Tibetan mandala to map Mitchell's fictional world, Harris-Birtill positions Mitchell as central to a new generation of post-secular writers who re-examine the vital role of belief in galvanizing action amidst contemporary ecological, political and humanitarian crises. David Mitchell's Post-Secular World features two substantial new interviews with the author, a chronology of his fictions and a selected bibliography of important critical writings on his work.

Perched as he was at the beginning of literary modernism and the evolution of film as a medium, Henry James addressed a cluster of epistemological and aesthetic issues related to the visualization of reality. In Knowing It When You See It, Patrick O'Donnell compares several late novels and stories by Henry James with a series of films directed by Michael Haneké, Alfred Hitchcock, Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, and Lars Von Trier. O'Donnell argues that these issues find parallels in films made at the other end of an arc extending from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the initial years of the twenty-first. In mapping affinities between literature and film, he is not concerned with adaptation or discursivity, but rather with how the "visual" is represented in two mediums—with how seeing becomes knowledge, how framing what is seen becomes a critical part of the story that is conveyed, and how the perspective of the camera or the narrator shapes reality. Both James and these later auteurs "think" visually in ways that inter-illuminate their fictions and films, and newly bring into relief the trajectory of modernity in relation to visuality.

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Rostock, language: English, abstract: The paper intends to show you the relevance of power and authority in David Mitchell's novel “Cloud Atlas”. To do so this paper investigates the different characters and their identities. Do they all suffer from a kind of oppression and what else do they have in common concerning the question of dominance of stronger people towards weaker? These questions will be answered in the first chapter of the main body. Here the reader has to expect an overview of the different actions of the narrators rather than a general study of their characters. The several forms of oppression and the dangers the main characters had, have or will have to fear will be outlined. Furthermore, some other aspects and terms will be mentioned and explained there in general, especially the concept of temporality and its meaning inside the novel. After giving you this review I will concentrate on two main protagonists, Adam Ewing and Sonmi~451. Here again, but in a lot more detail, I will highlight the relevance of colonialism, dominance and slavery in the cases of these two characters. Questions that guide these chapters are the following: What have the narrators done or what have they not done to escape from their fate and what is the solution of their problems? In addition to the previous issues and goals I strive to achieve I want to complete this term paper with a conclusion. This conclusion first of all contains a summary of the general aspects dealt with in the main body. Moreover, a thesis will be established that might be controversial and proper to be discussed in subsequent contentions with the same or similar topics and will of course have reference to the overall topic colonialism, dominance and slavery in David Mitchell ́s “Cloud Atlas”.