The twenty-first century has been marked by an unprecedented intensification in globalisation, transnational mobility and technological change. According to Peter Boxall, there has been a ‘turn in the fiction of the new century’ to reflect this ‘contemporary global condition’ (Boxall 141). This turn is especially pertinent to any discussion of literature from Britain or the United States …
View More A Unified Scene? Global Fictions in the C21
Ali Smith’s There But For The (2011) is about a man who locks himself in the spare room during a dinner party, and stays there for several months. As a plus one guest, Miles Garth’s act of seclusion provides the catalyst for Smith’s ‘scathing social satire’ (Tancke 85) of the Lees and their suburban lifestyle, with, as Ulrike Tancke notes, their main concern relating to the preservation …
View More Celebrity and Surveillance in ‘There But For The’
Susan Sontag, in her 1969 work Styles of Radical Will, claimed that ‘there is no such thing as empty space. As long as a human eye is looking there is always something to see’ (10) – foreseeing with the simplicity of her statement a watershed moment in literary and cultural criticism, the spatial turn, the effects of which are still being comprehended and incorporated into the …
View More Towards a Taxonomy of Edgelands Literature
There is a line in David Peace’s Nineteen Eighty Three (2002) that is so resonant that its absence is all but unimaginable: ‘To us all and to the North – where we do what we want!’ (Peace 228). In a series of short articles for Alluvium I use the malevolence and pathos of this line – a toast drunk by corrupt police officers to a chimerical space which, as Christopher …
View More Original Modern or a New Kind of Ordinary?