In this issue of Alluvium, four contributors discuss an international variety of texts. What these novels and films all have in common is that their characters deal with adversity, be it through their surrounding society or their own inner lives. As such, their struggles, losses, and triumphs are examined. The four contributions thus come together to reflect on the impact literature can have on the world in criticizing injustices and imagining a better future.
View More Alluvium Editorial 10.2
Irish writer John McGahern stated in an interview with Eamon Maher, “I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts” (Maher 74). McGahern’s second novel, The Dark (1965), takes place in rural mid-century Ireland, with many scenes in the novels correlating to those in his memoir, published in 2005.
View More Shamrock Social Norms: Security, Catholicism, and Shame
The Künstlerroman has seen a resurgence of interest among millennial women writers. Describing novels in which the main character progresses toward the creation of art, the Künstlerroman is the perfect vehicle for metafictional interest in creative production—for instance, in the question of whether the novel can at once be imbricated within the market system and level meaningful aesthetic critique against it.
View More “Something as definitionally useless as art”: Contemporary Women Writers’ Künstlerromane and the Possibility of a Beautiful World
As the Internet fully embeds itself into the daily human experience, we as individuals and society have begun to live in hybrid realities of physical and non-physical communities. The Internet has introduced to humans a new cyber culture. And, saturated in this intangible novelty, we are yet to understand its full effects.
View More Reimagining Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Living in Virtual Spaces and Cyber Autocracy in Hank Green’s “The Carl Saga”
Capitalist Realism is described by Fisher as the capitalist ontology of the post-Fordist era, where capitalism ends in terms of its ability to expand but is so ingrained into the political and cultural imagination that society cannot conceive of anything beyond it (Fisher, Capitalist Realism 1-2). Fisher wrote Capitalist Realism in the wake of the 2008 financial crash and subsequent disruptions to economy and culture that revealed systemic problems with neo-liberal economics. Many writers expected this to mark an end to neoliberalism (Skonkwiler & Berge 2), however, political discourse remained unchanging across the spectrum.
View More “Is There No Alternative?”: Capitalist Realism and Genre in Contemporary Political Fiction
We are delighted to share a call for submissions for Alluvium, a partner journal of the British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies. Alluvium is an open access journal featuring short essays of around 2000-3000 words on key issues and emerging trends in 21st century writing and criticism. The journal publishes six issues a year, employing a system of post-publication by the engaged commentariat on the message boards of the journal’s website, enabling vital current ideas to find a rapid readership.
View More Alluvium General Call for Papers 2022
Alluvium 9.4 Special Issue: World Literature and the Alter|native Guest edited by Misbah Ahmed, Zahra Bazm Ara and Chris Griffin Writing in 1992, Kamau Brathwaite…
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In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Irish literature has been marked by a seemingly unprecedented proliferation of writing by women. From Sally Rooney’s global domination on bestseller lists to Anna Burns’ Booker Prize win, Irish women’s writing is flourishing within and without the borders of the island. This special issue focusing on twenty-first century Irish women’s writing emerges out of a desire to survey and interrogate this literary fecundity.
View More Alluvium Editorial 9.1: Twenty-First Century Irish Women’s Writing
This special issue is dedicated to papers presented at the biennial BACLS “What Happens Now?” Conference that took place on 2-3 September 2021. The conference focused on representing a variety of concerns and topics represented in contemporary literature studies, and these are reflected in the articles published in this issue: they address the intersections between literary studies, video games and television series, pertinent questions of representation and identity in contemporary literature, as well as exploring the political and social formations of the present through critical and creative methods.
View More Alluvium Editorial 10.1
Peaky Blinders serially and cumulatively critiques and subverts the (narrative) troping of trauma, both regarding its genesis and continuity/persistence, by diversifying and complicating its central properties and classifications in what, I argue, amounts to a parapractic approach to both trauma and historical fiction.
View More Ambiguity and Parapraxis: Serially Reframing Trauma in “Peaky Blinders”
In this essay, I will explore the connection between failure, haunting and structures of power, and of care, by talking about the shared failures of the ghost and the mother. My wider research proposes parallels between the figure of the ghost and the (figurative and real) mother. I see many of these parallels as present in the ‘failures’ (I can’t stress the inverted commas enough) that I believe these figures end up sharing, and this will be my focus here.
View More Failure: The Ghost and the Mother
This article will consider Rachel Greenwald Smith’s concept of the “Affective Turn” – which “chronologically coincides with the end of the postmodernism debates” (Smith, 424) – through the lens of two American novels published in 2020: Percival Everett’s Telephone and Brandon Taylor’s Real Life. Stylistically, these novels are quite different, and I will discuss them individually as well as unpack their similarities, examining their mutual relevance to contemporary fiction’s affective renewal.
View More “New year, new data”: Percival Everett’s Telephone, Brandon Taylor’s Real Life, and the Future of the “Affective Turn”