The Cambridge Companion to British Postmodern Fiction

The most comprehensive study available of key postmodern British fiction and its legacy in contemporary British writing. Informs readers about postmodern fiction's engagement with social and cultural issues such as race, sexuality, nationality, politics, and postcolonialism, and its influence on prominent 21st-century British writers.

Postmodern modes of writing have contributed to a rich tradition of innovative and memorable British fiction in the period stretching from the late twentieth century to the present day. Postmodernism has been dismissed as introspective or ahistorical, but its British incarnation demonstrates how compassionate, political, and socially conscious it can be. This volume provides fresh, accessible readings of the most influential examples of postmodern British fiction – and work by more recent, post-millennial writers working in its slipstream. It plots its emergence, reassesses its highpoint in the 1980s and 1990s, and delineates its legacy in the twenty-first century. A valuable resource for students, researchers, and the general reader, this Companion provides powerful critical frameworks to understand its geographies; its relationship to North American postmodernism; its renovation of literary forms such as the romance, speculative fiction, and the historical novel; and its vibrant engagements with race, gender, sexuality, and questions of national identity.