Description: From 1980 to the present, huge transformations have occurred in every area of British cultural life. The election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 ushered in a new neoliberal era in politics and economics that dramatically reshaped the British landscape. Alongside this political shift, we have seen transformations to the public sphere caused by the arrival of the internet and of social media, and changes in the global balance of power brought about by 9/11, the emergence of China and India as superpowers, and latterly the British vote to leave the European Union. British fiction of the period is intimately interwoven with these historical shifts. This collection brings together some of the most penetrating critics of the contemporary, to explore the role that the British novel has had in shaping the cultural landscape of our time, at a moment, in the wake of the EU referendum of 2016, when the question of what it means to be British has become newly urgent.
Brief description: Peter Boxall is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sussex. He is author of many books on the novel, including Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction (2006), Since Beckett (2009), Twenty-First-Century Fiction (Cambridge, 2013), and The Value of the Novel (Cambridge, 2015). He is editor of the bestselling 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2012) co-editor, with Byran Cheyette, of volume 7 of The Oxford History of the Novel (2016) and with Peter Nicholls of Thinking Poetry (2013). He is also editor, since 2009, of the journal Textual Practice. His most recent book, The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life, is forthcoming with Cambridge.