Abstract
The readings explored in the previous chapters constitute a recuperative project, which seeks to reassess the importance of social and ethical concerns explored within contemporary British fiction, to acknowledge a new understanding of British fiction’s relationship to postmodernism made available through changing literary and literary critical paradigms, and to recognise the central importance of these writers’ fictions in carving out a new post-consensus and post-millennial literary agenda. As James F. English remarks, in part due to the emergence of a global corporate literary market and prize culture, but also on account of this writing’s own critical orientation, ‘postwar British fiction had never actually been contemporary until now; it had finally, in the 1980s, managed to assert its contemporaneity, which seemed also to mean its worldliness, its recognition of and within a global literary geography’ (English, 2006, p. 2). Likewise, the readings I offer in this book emphasise this emerging global context, and with it the possibility of a cosmopolitan world vision explored through fiction, expressed (at least in part) as a localised understanding of globalism’s impact upon contemporary knowledge and ethics, which looks beyond the ideological limitations of what Ulrich Beck terms ‘methodological nationalism’ (Beck, 2006, pp. 2, 3, 5, 24), even while recognising the nation’s value as a necessary framework for implementing cosmopolitan ideals.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Brief sections of this Epilogue have been published previously in Horton (2011). I am grateful to East-West Cultural Passage for allowing me to republish this material here.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Copyright information
© 2014 Emily Horton
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Horton, E. (2014). Epilogue. In: Contemporary Crisis Fictions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137350206_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137350206_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-46830-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-35020-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)