This article analyses narratives of upward social mobility in two recent English novels, Exit Management (2020) by Naomi Booth and Assembly (2021) by Natasha Brown. It identifies various trajectories ...

Online event C21 Literature: Then & Now C21 Literature is celebrating the republication of its first three volumes. C21 Literature is the official journal of the British Association for Contempora...

C21 Literature is celebrating the republication of its first three volumes.

This article analyses narratives of upward social mobility in two recent English novels, Exit Management (2020) by Naomi Booth and Assembly (2021) by Natasha Brown. It identifies various trajectories ...

Climate change is often framed as an intractable or ‘wicked’ problem, with the temporal scope of the crisis being one of the key challenges. This article explores how climate fiction can deploy nonlinear narrative in tandem with creative metaphorical language to capture this temporal complexity. My example is Ian McEwan’s 2025 novel What We Can Know. In McEwan’s work, spatial metaphors inspired by geology and archaeology convey multiple climate temporalities and the ethical stakes of their convergence. More specifically, the novel links an experience of moral implication to a writer’s criminal behavior, resulting in a satire of literature’s complicity in environmental destruction.

Climate change is often framed as an intractable or ‘wicked’ problem, with the temporal scope of the crisis being one of the key challenges. This article explores how climate fiction can deploy nonlin...

The Routledge Companion to World‐Literature and the Environment takes a broad, global overview of the history, present and potential futures of environmental and literary studies, demonstrating that w...

This article examines two 2020 sports novels (The Cactus League by Emily Nemens and A Short Move by Katherine Hill) through the lens of riskless risk, a notion developed by Nicky Marsh by drawing on the work of Slavoj Zizek. My contention is that these novels depict an increasing separation between wealthy athletes and general society, a separation to which they are subjected by the superstructure constituted by sports leagues/franchises. Such phenomena reflect a trend towards riskless risk in American society at-large. However, I show that the peculiarities of sports entail significantly different iterations of riskless risk for athletes: firstly, because the dynamic between their intense training and inner drive produces high degrees of self-centeredness that render them assets in the eyes of the league and the fans; secondly, because the physical nature of sports naturally leads to constant threats to the body and shortens the athletes’ careers; thirdly, because the dynamic between training and inner drive fosters unmanageable competitive impulses that evade the protection afforded by the league. I also demonstrate that the last point is the mark of contemporaryAmerican sports literature. Finally, I discuss the relative lack of interest of contemporary literary fiction authors in professional sports people.  

Cambridge Core - Literary Theory - The Disinterested Teacher

This essay uses the multivalent analytic framework of ‘exquisite corpse’ collage as a way of reading Helen Oyeyemi’s 2015 novel, Boy, Snow, Bird. Starting with a scene in which two characters produce ...