contemporary literature

Issue 4.2 Previous Issues

Displaced Perspective

The United Nations refugee agency – UNHCR – released a report in 2012 which argued that displacement, predominately caused by war, is ‘the new twenty-first century challenge’ (UNHCR Global Trends). Through the perspective of a vulnerable and …

Issue 4.1 Previous Issues

Litter, Landscape and The Road

Antony Mullen February 27, 2015 No Comments contemporary fiction contemporary literature Cormac McCarthy Cultural Landscapes dystopia literature post-9/11 literature post-apocalyptic fiction postmodernism trauma

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) presents a dystopian vision of a near-future world in which most organic vegetation has died and human life is becoming increasingly rare. It is not unusual for dystopian fiction to …

Issue 4.1 Previous Issues

Reconsidering Quarantine in Invasion Narratives

Jacob Murphy February 27, 2015 No Comments contemporary literature Epidemic fiction globalisation Invasion literature Max Brooks Medical Fiction Quarantine science fiction Zombies

The academic and public interest in supernatural invasion narratives has increased exponentially in the 20th and 21st centuries. According to Terrence Rafferty of The New York Times, the fascination with the zombie apocalypse …

Issue 4.1 Previous Issues

The Legitimacy of Literary Opinion

Zita Farkas February 27, 2015 No Comments Andrew Keen Book Blooging contemporary literature digital culture Legitimacy Lionel Shriver literary criticism Opinion Paul Laity Popular Criticism Sir Peter Stothard

The influences of cyberspace have been decried as the death of literature as we know it, the death of the book, and now also as the death of the critic. The changes introduced by the Internet in the production and reception of literature …

Issue 3.1 - Special Issue "Critical Environments" Previous Issues

The Thoughts in our Head: A World

Louise Squire September 24, 2014 1 Comment Amitav Ghosh climate change contemporary literature disaster fiction Doris Lessing ecocatastrophe environmental crisis Gaia global warming James Lovelock Jeanette Winterson Margaret Atwood post-apocalyptic fiction the Anthropocene

The early years of the twenty-first century have seen—among its various issues and events—the beginnings of a global assimilation of the recognition…

Issue 2.4 - Special Issue "Thatcher's Legacies" Previous Issues

Gordon Burn and Mrs T

Rhona Gordon July 21, 2013 No Comments 1980s power fashion Alan Hollinghurst Anthony Hope Born Yesterday contemporary literature Damien Hirst Elaine Scarry For the Love of God Gordon Brown Gordon Burn Iron Lady James Graham Madeleine McCann Margaret Thatcher's funeral New Labour Peter Morgan Philip Hensher Richard Schickel The Line of Beauty Tony Blair

One of the strangest, and most recurrent, observations about Margaret Thatcher’s funeral was the number of celebrity mourners, including, but not limited to, Katherine Jenkins, Joan Collins, Jeremy Clarkson, Terry Wogan and Shirley Bassey…

Issue 1.5 Previous Issues

The Third Reich in Contemporary Fiction

Richard Martin October 1, 2012 4 Comments Adolf Eichmann Auschwitz Babi Yar massacres Berlin Christopher Browning contemporary literature Daša Drndić European novel Hannah Arendt HHhH historical fiction Jonathan Littell Kurt Franz Laurent Binet Max Aue Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe Primo Levi SS officer The Kindly Ones Thurd Reich Trieste twenty-first-century literature

What voice is suitable to describe the horrors of the Third Reich? From whose perspective should the catastrophic events be narrated? What is the relationship, in such…

Issue 1.4 Previous Issues

Human Nature: Pastoral in the Anthropocene

Deborah Lilley September 1, 2012 2 Comments Anthropocene Arcadia Being Dead contemporary literature ecological concerns Edgelands Findings geological epoch Glen Love Glister human action Jim Crace John Barrell John Bull John Burnside Kathleen Jamie Lawrence Buell Leo Marx Martin Ryle Michael Symmons Roberts pastoral Paul Farley Raymond Williams Terry Gifford The Country and the City The Pesthouse zoology

With the proposition that we are now living in the Anthropocene – the geological epoch defined by human activities and their effects – the conditions of the pastoral are placed under unprecedented threat, and at the same time, they can be seen to be given new significance.

Issue 1.2 Previous Issues

On Nuclear Criticism

Christopher Daley July 1, 2012 2 Comments anti-Iraq protest apocalyptic literature Cold War contemporary literature Cormac McCarthy deterrent Diacritics Guide to Armageddon Jacques Derrida nuclear criticism Protect and Survive Riddley Walker Russell Hoban Threads

In 1984, the journal Diacritics set out to define what it labelled as the developing academic terrain of ‘nuclear criticism’. The opening section of the journal entitled…

Issue 1.1 Previous Issues

Editors’ Introduction: Issue 1.1

Caroline Edwards June 1, 2012 2 Comments Alluvium contemporary literature Editor's Introduction literary criticism scholarship theoretical approaches theory twenty-first-century literature

Welcome to the launch issue of Alluvium, a new online journal of literary criticism that is dedicated to 21st-century writing as well as 21st-century approaches…