About this ebook
This book represents an important step in building a body of criticism on an important, if until now under-researched, British novelist of the last 30 years. The essays collected here reveal the diverse range of Thomson's writing and locate it thoughtfully within the broader field of contemporary fiction. It provides a series of critical engagements with his writing that broadens and deepens our understanding of his corpus. --Nick Bentley, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Keele University
Rupert Thomson is one of the most versatile and vital of contemporary novelists, whose work has so far been curiously neglected by critics. This excellent volume goes some way towards redressing the balance, examining the ways in which Thomson's unsettling body of work explores some of the most pressing themes of our turbulent age - borders, power relations, security, secrecy, precarity, etc. Its contributors place Thomson's writing in the context of a range of up-to-date literary and theoretical approaches, making this essential reading for anyone interested in his work, and important reading for those interested in contemporary fiction more broadly. --Bran Nicol, Professor English Literature, University of Surrey
Rupert Thomson's innovative and unsettling writing ranges from dystopian alternative futures to meditations on crime and cultural memory, and from historical fictions to explorations of contemporary gender violence. The essays in this collection argue that Thomson's novels and memoir are compelling case-studies in late twentieth and early twenty-first-century literature, which engage with contemporary cultural and political preoccupations through persistently off-beat and often experimental literary forms, and trouble stable definitions of genre in the process. With chapters focusing on borders, panopticism, haunting, child sexual abuse, shame, atmosphere and intertextuality, this collection offers a critical introduction to an author whose work has been overlooked by the academy for too long.
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About the author
Robert Duggan is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Central Lancashire. He is the author of The Grotesque in Contemporary British Fiction (MUP, 2013). He has published widely on modern British literature and his research explores experiments in literary form and genre in the work of writers including Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Angela Carter, Will Self, Iain Banks, Toby Litt and China Miéville.
Rhona Gordon completed her PhD at the University of Glasgow with her thesis entitled ‘Housing Matters in the Texts of Gordon Burn, Andrew O’Hagan and David Peace.’ She has published on Burn, Peace and O’Hagan and is currently turning her thesis into a monograph. Her research interests include working-class British fiction, representations of late twentieth century housing and twenty/twenty-first century celebrity.
John McAuliffe is Reader in Modern Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. He has published four poetry collections, his book Of All Places was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for autumn ٢٠١١. John’s poems have appeared in The Guardian, Irish Times and many literary journals. He co-founded Manchester’s Centre for New Writing, and writes a monthly poetry column for The Irish Times. His most recent collection, The Way In, was published in 2015.
Kaye Mitchell is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Manchester. She is the author of A.L. Kennedy(Palgrave, 2007) and Intention and Text (Continuum, 2008), and edited Sarah Waters (Bloomsbury, 2013) and a special issue of Contemporary Women’s Writing on experimental writing (2015). Her work in progress includes a monograph on the politics and poetics of shame in contemporary literature (for which she received a Humboldt Experienced Researcher Fellowship) and a co-edited collection on British avant-garde writing of the 1960s.
Rebecca Pohl is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester where she works on a Leverhulme project on aesthetics. Rebecca’s research is situated at the intersection of contemporary literature and women’s writing, with a particular focus on literary institutions and discourses of literary value. Her current project looks at experimental women’s writing, especially the relationship between pleasure, accessibility and difficulty. Rebecca has published on Sarah Waters and Victorian visual culture. She translates theory and poetry.
Iain Robinson is Tutor at the University of East Anglia. He holds a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia. His book chapter on Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army appeared in What Happens Now (Palgrave, 2013) and his article on Will Self’s The Book of Dave is published in the journal C21 Literature (Gylphi, 2013). His short fiction has appeared in Litro Magazine, The Missing Slate, The Lonely Crowd, and the short story anthologies Hearing Voices (Litro, 2015) and Being Dad (Tangent, 2016). He is on the editorial team of Lighthouse Journal.
Christopher Vardy is completing a PhD exploring figurations of Thatcherism and the End of History in twenty-first-century British fiction. He has previously published journal articles on contemporary American fiction and dystopian/abusive narratives about the recent past, as well as book chapters on the politics of nostalgia and childhood.
