Up until fairly recently, memory used to be mainly considered within the frames of the nation and related mechanisms of group identity. Building on mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, this form of memory focused on the event as a central category of meaning making. Taking its cue from a number of Anglophone novels, this book examines the indeterminate traces of memories in literary texts that are not overtly concerned with memory but still latently informed by the past. More concretely, it analyzes novels that do not directly address memories and do not focus on the event as a central meaning making category. Relegating memory to the realm of the latent, that is the not-directly-graspable dimensions of a text, the novels that this book analyses withdraw from overt memory discourses and create new ways of re-membering that refigure the temporal tripartite of past, present and future and negotiate what is ‘memorable’ in the first place. Combining the analysis of the novels’ overall structure with close readings of selected passages, this book links latency as a mode of memory with the productive agency of formal literary devices that work both on the micro and macro level, activating readers to challenge their learned ways of reading for memory.

Literary works play a crucial role in modelling and conceptualising temporalities. This becomes particularly apparent in times of crises, which put conventionalised temporal patterns and routines under pressure. During crises, past, present, and future appear to collapse into each other and give way to temporal disjunction and rupture. Offering pluralised and context-sensitive approaches to temporalities in and of crises, this volume explores how literature’s engagement with crises suggests both the need for and possibility of rethinking ‘time’. The volume is committed to examining the affordances of specific genres and their potential in pointing beyond temporalities of crises to facilitate a sense of futurity. Individual essays are grounded in recent theories of temporality and literary form, which are related to novel advancements in ecocriticism, queer studies, affect theory, and postcolonial studies. The chapters cover a broad range of examples from different literary genres to reveal the knowledge of literature about temporalities in and of crises.

This book probes the complex relationship between memory and storytelling in contemporary literature. It not only examines how memory is constantly made and remade through words and stories but also explores how literary practices and imagination are shaping new concepts of memory in the 21st century. By analyzing the selected novels – Penelope Lively’s The Photograph, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending and The Only Story, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and Felicia Yap’s Yesterday – this book explores the dynamic interplay of remembering and forgetting, and redefines the relationship between fiction and memory in the 21st century.

This book explores the complex interrelationship between fact and fiction in narratives of the twenty-first century. Current cultural theory observes a cultural shift away from postmodernism to new forms of expression. Rather than a radical break from the postmodern, however, postmodernist techniques are repurposed to express a new sincerity, a purposeful self-reflexivity, a contemporary sense of togetherness and an associated commitment to reality. In what the editors consider to be one manifestation of this general tendency, this book explores the ways in which contemporary texts across different media play with the boundary between fact and fiction. This includes the examination of novels, autobiography, autofiction, film, television, mockumentary, digital fiction, advertising campaigns and media hoaxes. The chapters engage with theories of what comes after postmodernism and analyse the narratological, stylistic and/or semiotic devices on which such texts rely. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.

This book offers an overview on the growing field of nonhuman studies in relation to Anglophone novels. It illuminates the variety of nonhuman actors that take centre stage in the twenty-first-century novel and the formal changes that the Anthropocene, the digital turn, the animal rights movement, and research into plant consciousness have brought to the novel as a form. The book is divided into four sections, each focusing on a different aspect of twenty-first-century literature that engages with the nonhuman. The collection investigates how the environmental changes and the increasing use of AI technologies have fostered the flourishing of genres like the New Weird, Climate Fiction, and speculative fiction, how it makes us embrace new perceptions of life in relation to genetic engineering, and how it forces us to engage with newly emerging political contexts.

This volume explores the multifarious representational strategies used by contemporary writers to textualise memory and its friction areas through literary practices. By focusing on contemporary narratives in English from 1990 to the present, the essays in the collection delve into both the treatment of memory in literature and the view of literature as a medium of memory, paying special attention to major controversies attending the representation and (re)construction of individual, cultural and collective memories in the literary narratives published during the last few decades. By analysing texts written by authors of such diverse origins as Great Britain, South-Korea, the USA, Cuba, Australia, India, as well as Native-American Indian and African-American writers, the contributors to the collection analyse a good range of memory frictions —in connection with melancholic mourning, immigration, diaspora, genocide, perpetrator guilt, dialogic witnessing, memorialisation practices, inherited traumatic memories, sexual abuse, prostitution, etc.— through the recourse to various disciplines —such as psychoanalysis, ethics, (bio)politics, space theories, postcolonial studies, narratology, gender studies—, resulting in a book that is expected to make a ground-breaking contribution to a field whose possibilities have yet to be fully explored.

This book examines contemporary literary representations of global mobility. It pays particular attention to refugee writing and displacement, migration and memory, and new European identities, and revises the field of postcolonial studies.