Twenty-First Century Fiction

Chapter 1 Introduction: What Happens Now

Chapter 2 ‘Such a Thing as Avant-Garde Has Ceased to Exist’: The Hidden Legacies of the British Experimental Novel

Chapter 3 Tough Shit Erich Auerbach: Contingency and Estrangement in David Peace’s Occupied City and Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

Chapter 4 When the Two Sevens Clash: David Peace’s Nineteen Seventy-Seven as ‘Occult History’

Chapter 5 Remaindered Books: Glen Duncan’s Twenty-First Century Novels

Chapter 6 ‘The journey creates us. We become the frontiers we cross’: Stepping Across Lines in Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown

Chapter 7 ‘The Private Rooms and Public Haunts’: Theatricality and the City of London in Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White

Chapter 8 ‘This is my Opa. Do you remember him killing the Jews?’ Rachel Seiffert’s ‘Micha’ and the Transgenerational Haunting of a Silenced Past

Chapter 9 A Voice without a Name: Gothic Homelessness in Ali Smith’s Hotel World and Trezza Azzopardi’s Remember Me

Chapter 10 Ghosts of Postmodernity: Spectral Epistemology and Haunting in Hilary Mantel’s Fludd and Beyond Black

Chapter 11 Intimations of Immortality: Sémiologies of Ageing and the Lineaments of Eternity in Contemporary Prose

Chapter 12 Crosshatching: Boundary Crossing in the Post-Millennial British Boom

Chapter 13 ‘You just know when the world is about to break apart’: Utopia, Dystopia and New Global Uncertainties in Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army

Chapter 14 Finding the Right Kind of Attention: Dystopia and Transcendence in John Burnside’s Glister