Cultural politics and narrative trends in contemporary anglophone fiction : a case study of the 2019 Booker Prize for Fiction

Abstract

The Booker Prize for Fiction is one of the most prestigious British literary prizes, awarding £50,000 to the best original novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. Over the course of a year, a panel of five judges selects thirteen novels from over 150 submissions, whittling this longlist down to a shortlist of six novels, and finally deciding on a winner. Since its inception in 1968, it has solidified a reputation for being a reliable indicator of quality fiction. In recent years, however, the Prize has been criticised for seeking to strike a balance between serious and commercial fiction. The 2019 Booker Prize for Fiction turned out to be a controversial year as a result of the judges awarding the Prize to two novels – Margaret Atwood‟s The Testaments and Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other – despite the 1992 rule stipulating that the Prize could not be split between two or more nominees. The decision was ridiculed in various quarters; it was felt that what could have been a historic achievement in Evaristo being the first black female writer to win the Prize was overshadowed by having to share the Prize with Atwood, a previous Booker winner. Considering its reputation, both prestigious and controversial, the Booker Prize can serve as an investigatory case study into the current state of contemporary fiction. Analysing those thirteen novels‟ literary themes and tropes might reveal a pattern as to the kind of content and form that tends to warrant nomination. Furthermore, the double winner controversy allows for a discussion into the cultural politics surrounding debates concerning contemporary literature, as well as prize worthiness. While the majority of the novels deal with political issues in terms of their content, what emerged as more important was a preoccupation with form. Indeed, the novels are mostly concerned with how we receive and organise contemporary chaos. The trends that emerged from this survey included: documentarism and its inherent pitfalls; a temporal concern with liminal atmospherics as a result of constructing new languages for understanding contemporary existence; and a proliferation of collage techniques as one such language. Furthermore, a discussion on novel length also emerged, in terms of how the Booker Prize confronts the pragmatic reality of distracted readers. It is acknowledged that the catalogue of narrative trends proposed by the dissertation is not exhaustive, and that the Booker Prize itself is not necessarily representative of the state of contemporary fiction in general. However, this survey does yield interesting conclusions on the thematic and formal concerns of the 2019 Booker Prize novels, on narrative trends, and on a distinct cultural moment in debates around the novel form. This in turn can lead to reflections on contemporary fiction more generally in comparison to other notable British literary prizes, but also to other narrative and cultural contexts. It will be noted that the dissertation makes use of extensive quotation from review articles. As this discussion is concerned with taxonomy-building and in mapping critical accounts of narrative trends, what will appear as a catalogue of critical commentary is intended to confront the relation between literary prizes and the poetics of contemporary fiction, and the extent to which studying the one can be coextensive with studying the other. Following in the tradition of such poetics constructions, an Appendix of scanned material from the novels has been provided to have a better appreciation of their formal techniques and aesthetics.