Literary Research and British Postmodernism is a guide for scholars that aims to connect the complex relationships between print and multimedia, technological advancements, and the influence of critical theory that converge in postwar British literature. This era is unique in that strict boundaries between fiction, nonfiction, multimedia and print are not useful. Postmodern literature is defined by the breaking down of boundaries as a reaction to modernism and requires an innovative, multifaceted approach to research. In this guide the authors explore these complex relationships and offer strategies for researching this new period of literature. This book takes a holistic approach to postmodern literature that recognizes the way in which digital media, film, critical theory, popular music and more traditional print sources are inextricably linked. Through this approach, the authors present a broad view of “postmodernism” that includes a wide variety of British authors writing in the last half of the twentieth century. The book’s definition of “postmodern” includes any British literature following World War II that engages issues central to postmodern theory, including the social construction of gender, sexuality, and power; the subjectivity of truth; technology as a social force; intertextuality; metafiction; post-colonial narrative; and fantasy. This guide aims to aid researchers of postwar British literature by defining best practices for scholars conducting research in a period so broadly varied in the way it defines literature.

How can the short story help to redefine modernism, postmodernism and their interrelationship? What is the status of the short story in modern literary history? These are the central questions that the essays collected in this volume try to answer from different perspectives through readings of short fiction in English and accounts of the genre’s theorisations. The essays by a group of international scholars tackle theoretical issues that are central in approaches to both “movements” such as periodisation, autonomy, high vs. popular literature, totality vs. fragmentation, surface vs. depth, otherness, representation, and, above all, the subject and its vicissitudes. Because it blends theory-based arguments into the approaches to the short fiction of mainly canonical authors (Joyce, Woolf, Lewis, Ballard, Carter, Rushdie, or Wallace), Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Short Story in English is of interest not only to readers and scholars of the short story, but also to those coming from the fields of literary theory and literary history.

Literary Research and British Postmodernism is a guide for researchers of postwar British literature that defines best practices for scholars conducting research in this period. Individual chapters connect the complex relationships between print and multimedia, technological a...

A lucid exploration of the key features of postmodernism and the most important authors from Beckett to DeLillo.

Postmodernism and Race explores the question of how dramatic shifts in conceptions of race in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been addressed by writers at the cutting edge of equally dramatic transformations of literary form. An opening section engages with the broad question of how the geographical and political positioning of experimental writing informs its contribution to racial discourses, while later segments focus on central critical domains within this field: race and performativity, race and the contemporary nation, and postracial futures. With essays on a wide range of contemporary writers, including Bernadine Evaristo, Alasdair Gray, Jhumpa Lahiri, Andrea Levy, and Don DeLillo, this volume makes an important contribution to our understanding of the politics and aesthetics of contemporary writing.

Literary Research and the Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Eras: Strategies and Sources is a guide to scholarly research in the field of medieval English literature covering the period 450 CE to 1500 CE. Graduate students and scholars researching this period face many challenges: working in two distinct literary traditions, comprehending multiple languages (Old English, Middle English, Latin, Anglo-Norman, and French), knowing the manuscript tradition for a particular title and the research methodologies for discovering and locating primary sources in the print and digital realms, and the awareness of the overlap and assimilation of literary themes with religious, historical, cultural, and political perspectives. The volume presents the best practices for building a foundation of sound scholarship practices in the field of medieval English literature. This volume explores primary and secondary resources, including general literary research guides; types of library catalogs; print and online bibliographies and indexes; scholarly journals and series; manuscripts, archives, and digital collections; genres; tools for understanding Old and Middle English such as dictionaries, lexicons, thesauri, glosses, etymologies, palaeographies, and text mining tools; and Web resources. The final chapter researches the shifting reputation of the poet, Thomas Hoccleve. Given the interdisciplinary nature of medieval studies, an appendix of additional readings in art, history, music, philosophy, religion, science, social sciences, and theater is provided.

This critical guide introduces major novelists and themes in British fiction from 1975 to 2005. It engages with concepts such as postmodernism, feminism, gender and the postcolonial, and examines the place of fiction within broader debates in contemporary culture.A comprehensive Introduction provides a historical context for the study of contemporary British fiction by detailing significant social, political and cultural events. This is followed by five chapters organised around the core themes: (1) Narrative Forms, (2) Contemporary Ethnicities, (3) Gender and Sexuality, (4) History, Memory and Writing, and (5) Narratives of Cultural Space.