Description:
A comprehensive analysis of millennial fiction, exploring its diverse forms, themes, and preoccupations across global contexts.
The 'millennial novel' is a term and genre that is at once over-debated and under-examined. As the first major book to survey and map out the millennial novel across multiple countries, this Companion offers a global framework for thinking about the dominant forms and preoccupations of writing by millennial authors. Scholars of contemporary literature will benefit from its breadth of investigation - across issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, family, social structures, nationhood and literary form - as well as its detailed studies of particular novels and authors, including Brit Bennett, Ocean Vuong, Ottessa Moshfegh, Sally Rooney, Raven Leilani and Ling Ma. Overall, The Edinburgh Companion to the Millennial Novel shows that millennial fiction is neither homogeneous nor impervious to previous socio-literary movements. In turn, it complicates our understanding of the genre, attempts to define the contours of contemporary literary production and reflects on twenty-first-century sociality.Brief description: Loïc Bourdeau is a scholar of French Studies and the Medical Humanities in the School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Maynooth University, formerly Louisiana Board of Regents Associate Professor of Francophone Studies at UL Lafayette. He has published extensively on contemporary cultural productions by marginalised voices in France and Québec. In addition to several chapters and articles, he has edited or co-edited four volumes, including Horrible Mothers. Representations across Francophone North America (2019), ReFocus: The Films of François Ozon (2021), and Revisiting HIV/AIDS in French Culture: Raw Matters (2022). He has edited special issues of the Australian Journal of French Studies (2020), Nouvelles Études Francophones (2022), and a special issue of Nottingham French Studies on 'The Twenty-first Century Social Novel in French' (2024).
Review Quotes: Bourdeau and Lloyd's expertly compiled volume provides a compassionate, capacious and complex analysis of the over-discussed but under-analysed concept of the millennial and its relationship to long-form fiction. Taking the term as a marketing and generational provocation, it boldly expands our understanding of the millennial's potential and limitations.--Rachel Sykes, University of Birmingham