Katy Shaw

This innovative study provides an exciting, challenging and accessible critical introduction to cultural representations of 1984–5 and analyses the ways in which these representations articulate an essential dialogic exchange of issues central to both the coal dispute and the development of literary and cultural studies over the past twenty five years. Focusing closely on the politics of form, the study interrogates the significance of the mode, means and function of strikers’ writings, as well as alternative representations of the conflict offered by established writers, musicians, artists and film-makers in the wake of the coal dispute. These representations are worthy of study due to the critical interventions they offer, their evidence of the cultural pressures and forces of not only the strike period, but the post-strike years of industrial and labour change and their remarkable contribution to existing social, political and literary histories. Engaging with these works, many of which have never been subject to previous academic analysis, the study enables twenty-first-century readers to re-conceptualise paradigms of received wisdom concerning 1984–5. The significance of the competing representations offered by these very different cultural modes as they engage in a wider battle to ‘author’ the conflict is central to this study. Through a detailed analysis of these representations, as well as the socio-cultural contexts of their production and dissemination, this book explores a range of attempts to capture the sensibilities of late twentieth century society and contributes to an ongoing debate regarding cultural representations of this period in British history. Influenced by critical theory, the text is the first secondary resource concerning cultural representations of the 1984–5 UK miners’ strike available to the reading public the world over.

Cultural Representations of the 1984-5 UK Miners’ Strike

Mining the Meaning

The financial crisis of 2008 quickly gave rise to a growing body of fiction: "crunch lit". Populated by a host of unsympathetic characters and centred around banking institutions, these 'recession writings' take the financial crisis as their central narrative concern to produce a new wave of literary and popular writings that satirise the origins and effects of modern life, consumer culture and the credit boom. Examining a range of texts from such writers as John Lanchester, Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, Sebastian Faulks and Bret Easton Ellis, this book offers the first wide-ranging guide to this new genre. Exploring the key themes of the genre and its antecedents in fictional representations of finance by the likes of Dickens, Conrad, Zola and Trollope, Crunch Lit also includes a timeline of key historical events, guides to further and online resources and biographies of key authors. Supported by online resources, the book is an essential read for students of 21st century literature and culture.

Crunch Lit

This book is the first ever collection about twenty-first century genre fiction. It offers accessible yet rigorous critical interventions in a growing field of popular culture and academic study, presenting new genres as a fascinating and powerful means of reading contemporary culture. The collection explores the history and uses of genre to date, analyses key examples of innovations and developments in the field and reflects on how these texts have been mobilised in teaching since the year 2000. It explores a range of new twenty-first century genres through a close reading of key examples, along with a broader critical overview at the beginning of each chapter capturing wider developments, contexts and themes. As a result of this contextual, text-orientated approach, the book promotes a broad appeal beyond the specifics of new genres and authors, and will contribute to a wider understanding of developments in post-millennial fictions.

Teaching 21st Century Genres

Kate Aughterson

This is a unique essay collection on Jim Crace, locating his writing within contemporary philosophical, cultural and political debates. This timely first critical collection of essays on Crace’s work provides a retrospective on his work to date, locating his work within a number of contemporary interdisciplinary critical and cultural perspectives and concerns, including post-humanism, post-millennial pastoralism, post-post feminism and gender, intersections between science and literary theory, environmental politics, the symbiotics of authorial and critical archival work, and the context of the burgeoning world of literary prizes. It includes additional contextual material in the form of an interview with Jim Crace and the re-publication of a seminal critical essay on “Craceland” by Adam Begley. As such this critical essay collection will be essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary fiction, and Crace’s unique writing.

Into the Wilderness

Jim Crace

Post-millennial writings function as a useful prism through which we can understand contemporary English culture and its compulsion to revisit the immediate past. The critical practice of hauntology turns to the past in order to make sense of the present, to understand how we got to this place and how to build a better future. Since the Year 2000, popular culture has been inundated with representations of those who occupy a space between being and non-being and defy ontological criteria. This Pivot explores a range of contemporary English literatures - from the poetry of Simon Armitage and the drama of Jez Butterworth, to the fiction of Zadie Smith and the stories of David Peace - that collectively unite to represent a twenty-first century world full of specters, reminiscence and representations of spectral encounters. These specters become visible and significant as they interact with a range of social, political and economic discourses that continue to speak to the contemporary period. The enduring fascination with the spectral offers valuable insights into a contemporary English culture in which spectral manifestations signal towards larger social anxieties as well as to specific historical events and recurrent cultural preoccupations. The specter confronts the contemporary with the necessity of participation, encouraging the realisation that we must engage with it in order to create meaning. Narrative agency is the primary motivating force of its return, and the repetition of the specter functions to highlight new meanings and perspectives. Harnessing hauntology as a lens through which to consider the specters haunting twenty-first century English writings, this Pivot examines the emergence of a vein of hauntological literature that profiles the pervasive presence of the past in our new millennium.

The Presence of the Past in Twenty-First Century English Literature

Hauntology

Analysing David Peace provides an exciting, challenging and accessible critical introduction to the work of contemporary British novelist David Peace. Through a detailed analysis of his writings, as well as the socio-cultural contexts of their production and dissemination, the collection explores Peace’s attempts to capture the sensibilities of late twentieth century society and contributes to an ongoing debate in the media about his representations. Peace is an emerging author who is widely read and taught and whose novels are increasingly celebrated. In the past decade Peace has won the James Tait Black Memorial Award and was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. The four novels of his Red Riding Quartet interrogate British society of the 1970s/80s through the prism of the hunt for the serial killer dubbed the Yorkshire Ripper. GB84 examines the machinations of the 1984–5 UK miners’ strike, while The Damned United explores relationships between masculinity and football through the doomed reign of manager Brian Clough at British football club Leeds United in 1974. In the Tokyo Trilogy, Peace develops an interest in occupation and the occult, interrogating Japan’s post-war legacy of defeat and its resonance to our contemporary world. This collection offers an essential guide to the work of David Peace, as well as a unique insight into his canon to date.

Analysing David Peace

David Peace is an emerging British author who is widely read and taught, and whose novels are increasingly translated into commercial film (The Damned United, March 2009), as well as television (the UK's Channel 4 adaptation of the Red Riding Quartet, March 2009). While UK readers seek insight into the socio-cultural contexts of England's regions (and in particular his writing on the Yorkshire Ripper and the 1984-1985 miners' strike), Peace also has a following in the US, where both The Damned United and Red Riding are set to receive a national cinema release. This book provides a challenging but accessible critical introduction to his work through a detailed analysis of his writing, as well as the socio-cultural contexts of its production and dissemination. The book explores Peace's attempts to capture the sensibilities of late 20th-century society and contributes to an ongoing debate in the media about Peace's representations. A broad international appeal and readership are explored and discussed, especially in the context of crime fiction and social engagement. This text is the first critical resource concerning David Peace and will cover the full body of his writings to date, the debates his work has generated, and the often contentious representations offered by his novels. Influenced by critical theory, it will be the first secondary resource concerning this rising star of contemporary British literature.

Katy Shaw

About

Books

Join the club