Narratives Of Community In The Black British Short Story

Download or read book Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story written by Bettina Jansen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-08-16 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story offers the first systematic study of black British short story writing, tracing its development from the 1950s to the present with a particular focus on contemporary short stories by Hanif Kureishi, Jackie Kay, Suhayl Saadi, Zadie Smith, and Hari Kunzru. By combining a postcolonial framework of analysis with Jean-Luc Nancy’s deconstructive philosophy of community, the book charts key tendencies in black British short fiction and explores how black British writers use the short story form to combat deeply entrenched notions of community and experiment with non-essentialist alternatives across differences of ethnicity, culture, religion, and nationality.

Download or read book Borders and Border Crossings in the Contemporary British Short Story written by Barbara Korte and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-01-02 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book represents a contribution to both border studies and short story studies. In today’s world, there is ample evidence of the return of borders worldwide: as material reality, as a concept, and as a way of thinking. This collection of critical essays focuses on the ways in which the contemporary British short story mirrors, questions and engages with border issues in national and individual life. At the same time, the concept of the border, as well as neighbouring notions of liminality and intersectionality, is used to illuminate the short story’s unique aesthetic potential. The first section, “Geopolitics and Grievable Lives”, includes chapters that address the various ways in which contemporary stories engage with our newly bordered world and borders within contemporary Britain. The second section examines how British short stories engage with “Ethnicity and Liminal Identities”, while the third, “Animal Encounters and Metamorphic Bodies”, focuses on stories concerned with epistemological borders and borderlands of existence and identity. Taken together, the chapters in this volume demonstrate the varied and complex ways in which British short stories in the twenty-first century engage with the concept of the border.

Download or read book Postcolonial Youth in Contemporary British Fiction written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-07-19 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concepts of 'youth' and the 'postcolonial' both inhabit a liminal locus where new ways of being in the world are rehearsed and struggle for recognition against the impositions of dominant power structures. Departing from this premise, the present volume focuses on the experience of postcolonial youngsters in contemporary Britain as rendered in fiction, thus envisioning the postcolonial as a site of fruitful and potentially transformative friction between different identitary variables or sociocultural interpellations. In so doing, this volume provides varied evidence of the ability of literature—and of the short story genre, in particular—to represent and swiftly respond to a rapidly changing world as well as to the new socio-cultural realities and conflicts affecting our current global order and the generations to come. Contributors are: Isabel M. Andrés-Cuevas, Isabel Carrera-Suárez, Claire Chambers, Blanka Grzegorczyk, Bettina Jansen, Indrani Karmakar, Carmen Lara-Rallo, Laura María Lojo-Rodríguez, Noemí Pereira-Ares, Gérald Préher, Susanne Reichl, Carla Rodríguez-González, Jorge Sacido-Romero, Karima Thomas and Laura Torres-Zúñiga.

Download or read book Community in Contemporary British Fiction written by Sara Upstone and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-10-20 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining how British writers are addressing the urgent matter of how we form and express group belonging in the 21st century, this book brings together a range of international scholars to explore the ongoing crises, developments and possibilities inherent in the task of representing community in the present. Including an extended critical introduction that positions the individual chapters in relation to broader conceptual questions, chapters combine close reading and engagement with the latest theories and concepts to engage with the complex regionalities of the United Kingdom, with representation of writers from all parts of the UK including Northern Ireland. Including specific focus on the most challenging issues for community in the past five years, notably Brexit and the Covid-19 crisis, with a broader understanding of themes of local and national belonging, this book offers detailed discussions of writers including Ali Smith, Niall Griffiths, John McGregor, Max Porter, Amanda Craig, Bernadine Evaristo, Jonathan Coe, Bernie McGill, Jan Carson, Guy Gunaratne, Anthony Cartright, Barney Farmer, Maggie Gee and Sarah Hall. Demonstrating some of the resources that literature can offer for a renewed understanding of community, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in how British Literature contributes to our understanding of society in both the past and present, and how such understanding can potentially help us to shape the future.

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Migration Literature written by Gigi Adair and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-30 with total page 591 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Migration Literature offers a comprehensive survey of an increasingly important field. It demonstrates the influence of the “age of migration” on literature and showcases the role of literature in shaping socio-political debates and creating knowledge about the migratory trajectories, lives, and experiences that have shaped the post-1989 world. The contributors examine a broad range of literary texts and critical approaches that cover the spectrum between voluntary and forced migration. In doing so, they reflect the shift in recent years from the author-centric study of migrant writing to a more inclusive conception of migration literature. The book contains sections on key terms and critical approaches in the field; important genres of migration literature; a range of forms and trajectories of migration, with a particular focus on the global South; and on migration literature’s relevance in social contexts outside the academy. Its range of scholarly voices on literature from different geographical contexts and in different languages is central to its call for and contribution to a pluriversal turn in literary migration studies in future scholarship. This Companion will be of particular interest to scholars working on contemporary migration literature, and it also offers an introduction to new students and scholars from other fields. Chapter 15 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Download or read book Handbook of the American Short Story written by Erik Redling and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-01-19 with total page 712 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American short story has always been characterized by exciting aesthetic innovations and an immense range of topics. This handbook offers students and researchers a comprehensive introduction to the multifaceted genre with a special focus on recent developments due to the rise of new media. Part I provides systematic overviews of significant contexts ranging from historical-political backgrounds, short story theories developed by writers, print and digital culture, to current theoretical approaches and canon formation. Part II consists of 35 paired readings of representative short stories by eminent authors, charting major steps in the evolution of the American short story from its beginnings as an art form in the early nineteenth century up to the digital age. The handbook examines historically, methodologically, and theoretically the coming together of the enduring narrative practice of compression and concision in American literature. It offers fresh and original readings relevant to studying the American short story and shows how the genre performs American culture.

Download or read book Rethinking Community through Transdisciplinary Research written by Bettina Jansen and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-12-31 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers the first interdisciplinary survey of community research in the humanities and social sciences to consider such diverse disciplines as philosophy, religious studies, anthropology, sociology, disabilities studies, linguistics, communication studies, and film studies. Bringing together leading international experts, the collection of essays critically maps and explores the state of the art in community research, while also developing future perspectives for a cross-disciplinary rethinking of community. Pursuing such a critical, transdisciplinary approach to community, the book argues, can counteract reductive appropriations of the term ‘community’ and, instead, pave the way for a novel assessment of the concept’s complexity. Since community is, above all, a lived practice that shapes people’s everyday lives, the essays also suggest ways of redoing community; they discuss concrete examples of community practice, thereby bridging the gap between scholars and activists working in the field.