Students will be expected to obtain their own copies of these set texts
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by 'Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard. I am a lover of America . . . '
Never let me go by A story of love, friendship and memory.
The Road by A father and his young son walk alone through burned America, heading slowly for the coast. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. They have nothing but a pistol to defend themselves against the men who stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food - and each other.
The Accidental by The Smart family's lacklustre holiday in Norwich is turned upside down when a beguiling stranger called Amber appears, bringing with her love, joy, pain and upheaval. The Smarts try to make sense of their bewildering emotions as Amber tramples over family boundaries and forces them to think about their world and themselves in an entirely new way. The Accidental is at once a mysterious web of secret identities and a ruthlessly honest look at the silent cracks that can develop unnoticed in relationships over time.
Written on the body by Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulation of a lifetime gather there.
The Margin Without Centre by The title of this volume illustrates the significance of margins and the instability of demarcation in the fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro. The author approaches Ishiguro's writings as a corpus rather than separate units, examining the novels to illuminate their generic, theoretical or stylistic affiliations. The chapters attend to seemingly peripheral elements - trivial details, incoherent conversations, hackneyed notions, minor characters and everyday occurrences - in order to expose what is deliberately obscured or contained within the explicit narrative. The poststructuralist approach and the structuralist objective of this study may appear incongruous, but the seemingly incompatible pairing in fact articulates a number of paradoxes that Ishiguro's novels manifest: the alterity of the international, the disclosure of the concealed, the innovation of the banal, the significance of the trivial, the presence of the absent and the accord of the cacophonous.
Cormac Mccarthy and the Writing of American Spaces by In Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces Andrew Estes examines ideas about the land as they emerge in the later fiction of this important contemporary author. McCarthy's texts are shown to be part of larger narratives about American environments. Against the backdrop of the emerging discipline of environmental criticism, Estes investigates the way space has been constructed in U.S. American writing. Cormac McCarthy is found to be heir to diametrically opposed concepts of space: as something Americans embraced as either overwhelmingly positive and reinvigorating or as rather negative and threatening. McCarthy's texts both replicate this binary thinking about American environments and challenge readers to reconceive traditional ways of seeing space. Breaking new ground as to how literary landscapes and spaces are critically assessed this study seeks to examine the many detailed descriptions of the physical world in McCarthy on their own terms. Adding to so-called 'second wave' environmental criticism, it reaches beyond an earlier, limited understanding of the environment as 'nature' to consider both natural landscapes and built environments. Chapter one discusses the field of environmental criticism in reference to McCarthy while chapter two offers a brief narrative of conceptions of space in the U.S. Chapter three highlights trends in McCarthy criticism. Chapters four through eight provide close readings of McCarthy's later novels, from Blood Meridian to The Road.
Ali Smith by In such novels as Hotel World and the Whitbread Prize winning The Accidental, Ali Smith has established herself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary fiction. Covering her complete oeuvre, from the short stories to her most recent novel There but for the, this is the first comprehensive critical guide to Smith's work. Bringing together leading scholars, Ali Smith- Contemporary Critical Perspectives covers such topics as-
The Poetics of Genre in the Contemporary Novel by The Poetics of Genre in the Contemporary Novel investigates the role of genre in the contemporary novel: taking its departure from the observation that numerous contemporary novelists make use of popular genre influences in what are still widely considered to be literary novels, it sketches the uses, the work, and the value of genre. It suggests the value of a critical look at texts genre use for an analysis of the contemporary moment. From this, it develops a broader perspective, suggesting the value of genre criticism and taking into view traditional genres such as the bildungsroman and the metafictional novel as well as the kinds of amalgamated forms which have recently come to prominence. In essays discussing a wide range of authors from Steven Hall to Bret Easton Ellis to Colson Whitehead, the contributors to the volume develop their own readings of genre s work and valence in the contemporary novel."
Cormac Mccarthy by Critics have been quick to address Cormac McCarthy's indebtedness to southern literature, Christianity, and existential thought, but the essays in this collection are among the first to tackle such issues as gender and race in McCarthy's work.
