Sara Upstone

Literary Theory

Len Platt

Postmodernism Literature 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.

Postmodern Literature and Race

This is the first text to focus solely on the writing of British writers of South Asian descent born or raised in Britain. Exploring the unique contribution of these writers, it positions their work within debates surrounding black British, diasporic, migrant, and postcolonial literature in order to foreground both the continuities and tensions embedded in their relationship to such terms, engaging in particular with the ways in which this ‘new’ generation has been denied the right to a distinctive theoretical framework through absorption into pre-existing frames of reference. Focusing on the diversity of contemporary British Asian experience, the book engages with themes including gender, national and religious identity, the reality of post-9/11 Britain, the post-ethnic self, urban belonging, generational difference and youth identities, as well as indicating how these writers manipulate genre and the novel form in support of their thematic concerns.

Twenty-first-century voices

British Asian fiction

This book takes a post-racial approach to the representation of race in contemporary British fiction, re-imagining studies of race and British literature away from concerns with specific racial groups towards a more sophisticated analysis of the contribution of a broad, post-racial British writing. Examining the work of writers from a wide range of diverse racial backgrounds, the book illustrates how contemporary British fiction, rather than merely reflecting social norms, is making a radical contribution towards the possible future of a positively multi-ethnic and post-racial Britain. This is developed by a strategic use of the realist form, which becomes a utopian device as it provides readers with a reality beyond current circumstances, yet one which is rooted within an identifiable world. Speaking to the specific contexts of British cultural politics, and directly connecting with contemporary debates surrounding race and identity in Britain, the author engages with a wide range of both mainstream and neglected authors, including Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Julian Barnes, John Lanchester, Alan Hollinghurst, Martin Amis, Jon McGregor, Andrea Levy, Bernardine Evaristo, Hanif Kureishi, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hari Kunzru, Nadeem Aslam, Meera Syal, Jackie Kay, Maggie Gee, and Neil Gaiman. This cutting-edge volume explores how contemporary fiction is at the centre of re-thinking how we engage with the question of race in twenty-first-century Britain.

Rethinking Race and Identity in Contemporary British Fiction

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.

In her innovative study of spatial locations in postcolonial texts, Sara Upstone adopts a transnational and comparative approach that challenges the tendency to engage with authors in isolation or in relation to other writers from a single geographical setting. Suggesting that isolating authors in terms of geography reinforces the primacy of the nation, Upstone instead illuminates the power of spatial locales such as the journey, city, home, and body to enable personal or communal statements of resistance against colonial prejudice and its neo-colonial legacies. While focusing on the major texts of Wilson Harris, Toni Morrison, and Salman Rushdie in relation to particular spatial locations, Upstone offers a wide range of examples from other postcolonial authors, including Michael Ondaatje, Keri Hulme, J. M. Coetzee, Arundhati Roy, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Abdulrazak Gurnah. The result is a strong case for what Upstone terms the 'postcolonial spatial imagination', independent of geography though always fully contextualised. Written in accessible and unhurried prose, Upstone's study is marked by its respect for the ways in which the writers themselves resist not only geographical boundaries but academic categorisation.

Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel

Literary theory has now become integral to how we produce literary criticism. When critics write about a text, they no longer think just about the biographical or historical contexts of the work, but also about the different approaches that literary theory offers. By making use of these, they create new interpretations of the text that would not otherwise be possible. In your own reading and writing, literary theory fosters new avenues into the text. It allows you to make informed comments about the language and form of literature, but also about the core themes - concepts such as gender, sexuality, the self, race, and class - which a text might explore. Literary theory gives you an almost limitless number of texts to work into your own response, ensuring that your interpretation is truly original. This is why, although literary theory can initially appear alienating and difficult, it is something to get really excited about. Imagine you are standing in the centre of a circular room, with a whole set of doors laid out around you. Each doorway opens on to a new and illuminating field of knowledge that can change how you think about what you have read: perhaps in just a small way, but also perhaps dramatically and irrevocably. You can open one door, or many of them. The choice is yours. Put the knowledge you gain together with your own interpretation, however, and you have a unique and potentially fascinating response. Each chapter in Literary Theory: A Complete Introduction covers a key school of thought, progressing to a point at which you'll have a full understanding of the range of responses and approaches available for textual interpretation. As well as focusing on such core areas as Marxism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Structuralism and Poststructuralism, this introduction brings in recent developments such as Eco and Ethical Criticism and Humanisms.

Sara Upstone

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