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This is the first full-length study of Jeanette Winterson’s complete oeuvre, offering detailed analysis of her nine novels as well as addressing her non-fiction and minor fictional work. Susana Onega combines the study of formal issues such as narrative structure, perspective and point of view with thematic analyses approached from a variety of theoretical perspectives, from narratology and feminist theory to Hermetic and Kabalistic symbolism, to provide a comprehensive ‘vertical’ analysis of Winterson’s novels. Onega reveals the books as complex linguistic artefacts, crammed with intertextual echoes. She demonstrates the inseparability of form and meaning within Winterson’s work, and positions her within the wider context of contemporary British fiction alongside fellow visionaries such as Peter Ackroyd, Maureen Duffy and Marina Warner.
Preliminary material /Editors Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction -- INTRODUCTION /JEAN-MICHEL GANTEAU and SUSANA ONEGA -- READING TRAUMA IN PAT BARKER'S REGENERATION TRILOGY /LENA STEVEKER -- THE ETHICAL CLOCK OF TRAUMA IN EVA FIGES' WINTER JOURNEY /SILVIA PELLICER-ORTÍN -- “NOBODY'SMEAT”: REVISITING RAPE AND SEXUAL TRAUMA THROUGH ANGELA CARTER /CHARLEY BAKER -- “A NEW ALGEBRA”: THE POETICS AND ETHICS OF TRAUMA IN J.G. BALLARD'S THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION /JAKOB WINNBERG -- TRAUMA AS THE NEGATION OF AUTONOMY: MICHAEL MOORCOCK'S MOTHER LONDON /JEAN-MICHEL GANTEAU -- WHERE MADNESS LIES: HOLOCAUST REPRESENTATION AND THE ETHICS OF FORM IN MARTIN AMIS' TIME'S ARROW /MARÍA JE...
Providing detailed analysis of the recurrent structural and thematic traits in Peter Ackroyd's first nine novels, this work sets out to show how they grow out of the tension created by two apparently contradictory tendencies. These are, on the one hand, the metafictional tendency to blur the boundaries between story-telling and history, to enhance the linguistic component of writing, and to underline the constructedness of the world created in a way that aligns Ackroyd with other postmodernist writers of historiographic metafiction; and on the other, the attempt to achieve mythical closure, expressed, for example, in Ackroyd's fictional treatment of London as a mystic centre of power. This mythical element evinces the influence of high modernists such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and links Ackroyd's work to transition-to-postmodern writers such as Lawrence Durrell, Maureen Duffy, Doris Lessing and John Fowles.
This book builds on theories of Transmodernity by Rodríguez Magda, Dussel, Luyckx Ghisi and Ateljevic, inter alia. It investigates their links with Postmodernity, Postcolonialism or Transculturalism.
Drawing on a variety of theoretical approaches including trauma theory, psychoanalysis, genre theory, narrative theory, theories of temporality, cultural theory, and ethics, this book breaks new ground in bringing together trauma and romance, two categories whose collaboration has never been addressed in such a systematic and in-depth way. The volume shows how romance strategies have become an essential component of trauma fiction in general and traumatic realism in particular. It brings to the fore the deconstructive powers of the darker type of romance and its adequacy to perform traumatic acting out and fragmentation. It also zooms in on the variations on the ghost story as medium for the...
Featuring a broad range of contemporary British novelists from Iain Banks to Jeanette Winterson, Louis de Bernieres to Irvine Welsh and Salman Rushdie, this book offers an excellent introductory guide to the contemporary literary scene. Each entry includes concise biographical information on each of the key novelists and analysis of their major works and themes. Fully cross-referenced and containing extensive guides to further reading, Fifty Contemporary British Novelists is the ideal guide to modern British fiction for both the student and the contemporary fiction buff alike.
Some humanist critics contend that only realist texts have an ethical function, that there is no ethical message behind the parodic and self-conscious games played by experimental fiction and that, since emotion neutralises the ethical faculties, there is no ethical dimension in such excess-pedling postmodernist genres and modes as kitsch, melodrama and romance. Yet, one may argue that the defamiliarisation imposed by parody, metafictional overkill and sundry devices symptomatic of emotional paroxysm on the realist text involves some measure of criticism of received truth and makes for the practice of a non-deontic ethics of truths that is also fairly often an ethics of alterity. This volume examines analytical evidence for the ethical component in key experimental British novels from the 1960's to the present, with special focus on John Fowles, Brigid Brophy, B. S. Johnson, Angela Carter, Peter Ackroyd, A. S. Byatt, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Will Self, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes.
This book provides a comprehensive compilation of essays on the relationship between formal experimentation and ethics in a number of generically hybrid or "liminal" narratives dealing with individual and collective traumas, running the spectrum from the testimonial novel and the fictional autobiography to the fake memoir, written by a variety of famous, more neglected contemporary British, Irish, US, Canadian, and German writers. Building on the psychological insights and theorizing of the fathers of trauma studies (Janet, Freud, Ferenczi) and of contemporary trauma critics and theorists, the articles examine the narrative strategies, structural experimentations and hybridizations of forms,...
New Visibilities: Victimhood and Other Forms of Vulnerability in 21st-century Fiction (eds. Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega) addresses the relationship between trauma and ethics, and moves one step further to engage with vulnerability studies in their relation to literature and literary form. It consists of an introduction and of twelve articles written by specialists from various European countries and includes an interview with US novelist Jayne Anne Philips, conducted by her translator into French, Marc Amfreville, addressing her latest novel, Quiet Dell, through the victimhood-vulnerability prism. The corpus of primary sources on which the volume is based draws on various literary backgrounds in English, from Britain to India, through the USA. All contributions are original.
The Wounded Hero in Contemporary Fiction tracks the emergence of a new type of physically and/or spiritually wounded hero(ine) in contemporary fiction. Editors, Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteu bring together some of the top minds in the field to explore the paradoxical lives of these heroes that have embraced, rather than overcome, their suffering, alienation and marginalisation as a form of self-definition.