Twenty-First-Century Fiction A Critical Introduction

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.

Acknowledgements; List of illustrations; Introduction: twenty-first-century fiction; 1. Late culture in the early twenty-first century; 2. Inheriting the past: literature and historical memory in the twenty-first century; 3. The limits of the human; 4. A curious knot: terrorism, radicalism, the avant-garde; 5. Sovereignty, democracy, globalization; Bibliography; Index.

Peter Boxall is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He has published widely on modern and contemporary literature, including the recent books Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction (2006), Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism (2009) and 1001 Books You Must Read before You Die, 5th edition (2012).