Author: Joseph Anderton

Dr Joseph Anderton is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Birmingham City University. He is the author of Beckett’s Creatures: Art of Failure after the Holocaust (Bloomsbury, 2016) and is currently in the early stages of his second book, Writing Homelessness: Rough Sleeping in Contemporary British Literature. Joseph has research interests in modernism and its legacies, dehumanisation and the nonhuman, and has published articles on Beckett, Kafka, Coetzee, and Auster on these topics.

Issue 9.4 Previous Issues

Imagining Homelessness: Ethnofiction in Marc Augé’s No Fixed Abode and Mahsuda Snaith’s How To Find Home

What place does literary fiction have in addressing homelessness? French anthropologist Marc Augé and British-Bangladeshi writer Mahsuda Snaith prompt this question through their respective texts No Fixed Abode (2011) and How to Find Home (2019). Augé’s novellais about a retired tax inspector called Henri Cariou who sleeps in his car on the streets of Paris. With some savings and intent on maintaining hygiene and respectability, Henri calls himself a “top-of-the-range”, “clean-cut” homeless person initially (Augé 14, 34), but is a “living corpse, waking mummy” (54) before long.

Issue 8.3 – Special Issue "Contemporary Representations of Homelessness" Previous Issues

The Post-Millennial Rise of British Homelessness Literature

Joseph Anderton December 7, 2020 1 Comment British Homelessness poverty precarity voice

Approximately as many full-length novels and autobiographies written by British authors about or largely featuring homelessness were published in the last two decades as in the 50 years between 1950 and 2000. Homelessness seems to be growing in the public and cultural consciousness, and it remains a persistent and pressing issue.