Hanif Kureishi: Contemporary Critical Perspectives

(Hardback)

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Description

Since his astonishing Academy Award-nominated film, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Hanif Kureishi has been recognized as a major writer who has both documented and profoundly influenced contemporary British culture. His first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), remains a key work in redefining our sense of what it means to be English in the postcolonial era. Hanif Kureishi: Contemporary Critical Perspectives brings together leading scholars of contemporary British fiction and culture to reassess the full range of the author's writings, from novels such as The Black Album, My Son the Fanatic and Something to Tell You to films such as Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, My Son the Fanatic and Venus. As well as exploring Kureishi's handling of such themes as Thatcherism, terrorism, race, class and sexuality, the book move moves beyond sociological and psychoanalytical approaches, examining the stylistic features of his most recent novel, The Last Word. The volume includes interviews with Stephen Frears, the director of My Beautiful Launderette, and with Hanif Kureishi himself, as well as a foreword by Roger Michell, who has directed several of the authors screenplays, most recently Le Week-End.

Reviews

This collection will be valuable to researchers and students of contemporary British literature and British Asian cultural production. The new interview with Kureishi offers a blend of funny, laconic, unpretentious, and politically serious observations from the man himself, while many of the academic essays will interest Kureishi scholars because of their concern with the writers more recent and/or insufficiently discussed work. * Ariel: A Review of International English Literature *

Author Bio

Susan Alice Fischer is Professor of English at Medgar Evers College of The City University of New York, USA. She is Editor of The Literary London Journal and Co-Editor of Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education.