Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space: Style, Landscape, Perception

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This study examines the importance of space for the way contemporary novelists experiment with style and form, offering an account of how British writers from the past three decades have engaged with landscape description as a catalyst for innovation.
David James considers the work of more than fifteen major British novelists to offer a wide-ranging and accessible commentary on the relationship between landscape and narrative design, demonstrating an approach to the geography of contemporary fiction enriched by the practice of aesthetic criticism. Moving between established and emerging novelists, the book reveals that spatial poetics allow us to chart distinctive and surprising affinities between practitioners, showing how writers today compel us to pay close attention to technique when linking the depiction of physical places to new developments in novelistic craft.

Reviews

"The importance of setting to evoke emotions has long been a secret the best writers know. James explains it for the rest of us." -Book News, February 2009
Mention -Chronicle of Higher Education, March 6, 2009
"This study will prove valuable to students and scholars of the authors discussed, and of the contemporary British novel in general. Furthermore, as an examination of how space is conceptualized and depicted, its significance extends across disciplinary boundaries in the humanities and social sciences. James suggests in his conclusion that Particularizing something as ephemeral and abstract as literary space provokes us to reflect on current critical pursuits.' James's own valuable reflections on this subject run through his fascinating study, which offers a perceptive map of contemporary concerns in the field of literary studies at the same time as it helps to open up a new landscape for critical exploration." -- Paul Vlitos, Modern Language Review, April 2010
This is a highly intelligent work that establishes and engages with a very important and productive area of study. It is one of a surprisingly small number of sustained and theoretically informed critical studies of space and place in contemporary British fiction' The Review of English Studies, 2010 -- Paul Smethurst
Briefly reviewed in the Year's work in English Studies journal, vol 89, No. 1 The illuminating extended analysis of such individual practitioners of the novelistic art include J.G. Ballard, Iain Sinclair, Caryl Phillips, Pat Barker, Adam Thorpe, Trezza Azzopardi and A.L. Kennedy'

Author Bio

David James, Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature, Queen Mary, University of London, UK. Editor of several collections, including The Legacies of Modernism (2011), he is author of Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space (2008) and Modernist Futures (2012).