Continuum Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space: Style, Landscape, Perception (Continuum Literary Studies)

This is a rigorous but accessible account of the interface between landscape and style and form in contemporary British fiction.This study examines the importance of space for the way contemporary novelists experiment with aesthetic form, offering an account of how British writers from the past three decades have engaged with landscape depiction as a catalyst for stylistic innovation. James considers the work of over fifteen major British novelists to offer a wide-ranging and accessible commentary on the relationship between landscape and narrative design, while showing that our approach to those spaces mapped by contemporary fiction cannot be divorced from the emotional aspects of reading itself.Moving between established and emerging novelists, the book reveals that spatial poetics allow us to chart distinctive and surprising affinities between practitioners, demonstrating how writers today compel us to pay close attention to technique when linking the depiction of physical places to new developments in novelistic craft. Review 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, 2010The 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 --Year s work in English Studies journal, vol 89, No. 1 About the Author David James is Lecturer in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Nottingham, UK.