Introduction: What Happens Now

Abstract

Twelve years into the twenty-first century, we are at a point when reflection on what is happening now in fiction published in Britain in the new century is possible and indeed offers a unique critical opportunity. The first decade of the 2000s has been remarkable for its literary creativity and diversity. The peculiarly rich features of twenty-first century writing include not only the implications of beginning a new century, but also the particularly potent symbolic evocations that arise from the turn of the millennium. In addition to millennial and post-millennial discourses, the catastrophic events of 9/11, the War on Terror, and the 2008 financial crash and its aftermath have created a new political context that is already generating an abundance of creative and critical writing. And around these human conflicts looms the gathering response of the non-human world we share to the accumulated and accelerating impact of our species. This concatenation of events may be moving both literary fiction and academic criticism beyond the postmodernism associated with the neo-liberal politics of the last thirty years and driving a search for new forms, tropes and theoretical strategies to envisage new horizons of possibility. The essays in this collection reflect the vitality of research on contemporary writing and include a variety of contemporary themes, contexts and approaches such as utopianism; trauma studies; contemporary Gothic; twenty-first century science fiction; posthumanism; new realisms; and neo-Victorianism.