Abstract
Jim Crace is one of the most critically acclaimed British novelists writing today. Although he is sometimes thought of as a ‘cult’ figure, his oeuvre has an international reputation. Through an intense and visionary focus on specific times and contexts, the recurring themes of his novels are technologically induced change, the consequences of social reorganisation, new forms of governance, and the evolution of faith. In his fictions, the force of these concerns is made manifest through characters who play out on the page what Crace calls ‘the verities of the human condition’ (Crace in Smiley 1989) in a series of increasingly complicated engagements with their society.
A term invented by Begley (2003).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Works Cited
Battersby, Eileen. 2013. Harvest Time for Jim Crace as He Signs Off with a Final Novel. The Irish Times, March 11. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/harvest-time-for-jim-crace-as-he-signs-off-with-a-final-novel-1.1320737. Online.
Begley, Adam. 2003. Jim Crace, The Art of Fiction No. 179. The Paris Review, Issue 167. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/122/jim-crace-the-art-of-fiction-no-179-jim-crace. Online.
Boxall, Peter. 2013. Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Print.
Bracke, Astrid. 2017. Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel. London: Bloomsbury. Print.
Crace, Jim. 2003. Interview with Robert Birnbaum. Identity Theory http://www.identitytheory.com/jim-crace/. 31 March. Online.
———. 2013. Harvest. London: Vintage. Print.
———. 2015. Afterword. Quarantine. London: Picador. Ebook Edition. Online.
———. 2017. ‘Preface’, Continent (The Art of the Story Ecco Edition). London: Harper Collins. Print.
———. 2018. The Melody. London: Picador. Print.
Crace, Jim, and Harvey, Kate. 2013. Jim Crace: Picador Podcast. http://www.picador.com/blog/February-2013/picador-podcast-jim-crace. Online.
Dragas, Areti. 2014. The Return of the Storyteller in Contemporary Fiction. London: Bloomsbury. Print.
Empson, William. 1986. Some Versions of the Pastoral. London: The Hogarth Press. Print.
Ettin, Andrew V. 1984. Literature and the Pastoral. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Print.
Faludi, Susan. 1992. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women. London: Chatto and Windus. Print.
Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Print.
Heise, Astrid. 2016. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Print.
Johns-Putra, Adeline, and Parnham John. 2017. Literature and Sustainability: Concept, Text and Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Print.
Kermode, Frank. 1988. Into The Wilderness. The New York Times, April 12. http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/04/12/reviews/980412.12kermodt.html. Online.
———. 2000. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Print.
Lea, Richard. 2014. Eight Authors Surprised by $150,000 Windham Campbell Books Prizes. The Guardian, March 7. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/07/windham-campbell-books-prizes-150000. Online.
Liu, Max. 2018. Interview with Jim Crace. The Financial Times, February 9. https://www.ft.com/content/cc271cda-0a8f-11e8-bacb-2958fde95e5e. Online
McCarthey, Tom. 2017. Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. New York: New York Review Books. Print.
Said, Edward. 2006. On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. London: Bloomsbury. Print.
Smiley, Jane. 1989. What Is This Thing Called Bronze? The New York Times, July 16. http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/16/books/what-is-this-thing-called-bronze.html. Online.
Stanford, Peter. 2010. A Radical Proposal: Why Will Jim Crace’s Next Book Be His Last? The Independent, March 28. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/a-radical-proposal-why-will-jim-craces-next-book-be-his-last-1926729.html. Online.
Tew, Philip. 2006. Jim Crace. Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press. Print.
Vincent, Sally. 2001. Death and the Optimist. The Guardian, August 25. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/aug/25/fiction.features. Online.
Acknowledgements
-
I am indebted to Mister Al, the Singer and the Songs: A Personal Memoir by Richard Vince, Celui qui doit vivre by Victor Hugo, the Indices archive kept by the University of Texas at Austin, the Dobie Paisano Ranch, also in Austin (where this volume was completed), and the Estate of Mrs Marianne Pencillon. I also ought to thank the people of ( The Melody , 273)
The non-existent sources cited here, juxtaposed with the grammatical and visual aporia of the final broken-off sentence, intellectually and linguistically models fiction as both always partial and always fantastic. Many of Crace’s novels use paratextual material as meta-textual reading frames for the assiduous interpreter: the open-ended framing of this latest novel suggest simultaneously post the possibilities of a post-human world and that aesthetic traces maybe outlast us all: as he stated in a recent interview: ‘My books dislocate the reader rather than locate them’ (Liu 2018). In Crace’s work, the Romantic Kantian promise of the moral imperative that is the realm of the human aesthetic , is simultaneously asserted and denied, and it is in this realm, perhaps, that Crace’s spirit can live on.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Shaw, K., Aughterson, K. (2018). ‘Craceland’: An Introduction. In: Shaw, K., Aughterson, K. (eds) Jim Crace. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94093-9_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94093-9_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-94092-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-94093-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)