Twenty-First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The widespread use of electronic communication at the dawn of the twenty-first century has created a global context for our interactions, transforming the ways we relate to the world and to one another. This critical introduction reads the fiction of the past decade as a response to our contemporary predicament - one that draws on new cultural and technological developments to challenge established notions of democracy, humanity, and national and global sovereignty. Peter Boxall traces formal and thematic similarities in the novels of contemporary writers including Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, W. G. Sebald and Philip Roth, as well as David Mitchell, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dave Eggers, Ali Smith, Amy Waldman and Roberto Bolaño. In doing so, Boxall maps new territory for scholars, students and interested readers of today's literature by exploring how these authors narrate shared cultural life in the new century.

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CHOICE Review

Boxall (Univ. of Sussex, UK) presents a compelling reading of 21st-century novels as responding to a series of representational crises generated by the postmodernist sense of time and space. He writes that in the new millennium global fiction has confronted three epistemological and phenomenological ruptures: "A profound disjunction between our real, material environments and the new technological, political, and aesthetic forms in which our global relations are being conducted"; a fascination with the ways in which the experience of time seems increasingly compressed, yet also elongated and warped; and a "preoccupation" with contemporary reimaginings of human bodies as "more malleable, more mobile, more augmented, more copiable than ever before." Boxall draws on an impressively broad range of mostly Anglophone examples (along with an extended discussion of Roberto Bolano's 2666), with more detailed analyses of recent novels by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, J. M. Coetzee, Dave Eggers, Moshin Hamid, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, and Ali Smith. Despite frequent references to T. S. Eliot, this is a refreshingly current and theoretically nuanced study. Boxall makes a persuasive and always readable case for contemporary fiction in relation to its social, cultural, and political contexts. References and notes are useful but not excessive. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. J. Young Marshall University