Reading things differently abroad : encounters between European criticism and the contemporary British novel

Abstract

Students of late twentieth-century British narrative know that books about the area are not plentiful. Some researchers might, in mitigation, point to volumes like Margaret Scanlon's Traces of Another Time: History and Politics in Postwar British Fiction (1990), Andrzej Gasiorck's Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (1995), or Frederick R. Karl's recently reissued A Reader's Guide to the Contemporary English Novel (200 1). These are not enough to counter the impression that the critical response to contemporary British fiction has yet to move with some presence on the opportunities afforded by book-length studies focusing on the field generally and its poetics, and on thematic concerns and formal strategies of prominent or representative exponents. [excerpt]