Contemporary Crisis Fictions

Contemporary Crisis Fictions offers a significant statement about the contemporary British novel in relation to three authors: Graham Swift, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. All writing at the forefront of a generation, these authors sought to resuscitate the novel's ethico-political credentials, at a time which did not seem conducive to such a project. Thus, in a country often understood in terms of its aggressive individualism, consumer competition, and persistent nationalism, my claim for these writers is that, in addition to responding to this problematic context, they also work to establish a cosmopolitan ethics of interpersonal responsibility and cross-cultural awareness that is deeply relevant to contemporary British life. In part, this is a response to the gaps in past criticism, which repeatedly prioritises issues of textual self-consciousness over social and ethical concerns. Nevertheless, Contemporary Crisis Fictions celebrates these authors' writing on its own terms, highlighting the dialogical relationships each oeuvre establishes between local and global identity, as a means of approaching the 'structure of feeling' that links these works.