Skip to main content

Contemporary Fiction: An Introduction

Overview

  • Credit value: 30 credits at Level 6
  • Convenor: Professor Roger Luckhurst
  • Assessment: a 1500-word critical commentary (30%) and 3500-word essay (70%)

Module description

This module will orient you in dominant and emergent kinds of novel writing in the twenty-first century. We focus mainly on the novel form, which, although often declared dead or dying, has continually reinvented itself with new directions, responding to social and political changes. We will link literary texts to the social and political contexts of their publication, looking for instance at connections to the climate crisis or how rapid technological change impacts on narrative form. Texts will be in British and American English and some in translation, and the curriculum will change each year to be responsive to new developments to keep the module fresh and up to date.

Indicative syllabus

The State of Fiction Now

  • Introduction: What is the contemporary? And is the novel dead?
  • Paying attention: Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This
  • Autofiction - where fiction/memoir meet: Annie Ernaux, The Years
  • Historical fiction: Clare Keegan, Small Things Like These, plus film
  • Historical fiction: Benjamin Wood, Seascraper

Reading the Crisis

  • Crisis 1: Migration - Chimamanda Ngozi Aidichie, ‘The Thing Around Your Neck’ (short story); Mohsin Hamid, Exit West (novella)
  • Crisis 2: Climate crisis - Megan Hunter, The End We Start From, plus film
  • Crisis 3: Liberal democracy and the rise of authoritarianism - Paul Lynch, Prophet Song
  • Crisis 4: The end of the world - Cormac McCarthy, The Road, plus film
  • Getting away from it all: Cosy Crime - Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club, plus film

Learning objectives

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

  • understand the place of fiction in wider contemporary culture
  • understand some frameworks for defining the ‘contemporaneity’ of the contemporary
  • show knowledge of some of the leading literary voices in the present
  • respond to emergent trends in writing in the present
  • discuss ways of reading culture within its broader social and political contexts.