Generic Instability and Identity in the Contemporary Novel
About this ebook
The much-feared apocalypse of the novel has failed to take place with the arrival of the new millennium, but generic game-playing and flickering, narrative hesitation and uncertainty continue to pose the question of what constitutes a novel today and to challenge its identity in a world where all culture is increasingly public, increasingly contested and increasingly multifarious. Thanks to theoretical approaches as well as analyses of specific works, this collection of essays aims to examine the concepts of generic instability and cross-fertilization, of narrative postures and impostures, and their constant redefinition of identity, which contaminates the very concept of genre. It demonstrates the diversity of generic practices in the novel today and furnishes us with undeniable evidence of how generic instability is fundamentally constitutive of the contemporary novel’s identity.
About the author
Marie Odile Pittin-Hédon is a lecturer in contemporary British literature at Avignon University, France, and specializes in Scottish literature. She has published a monograph, Alasdair Gray: Marges et Effets de Miroirs, in 2004, and chapters on contemporary fiction in The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature (2007) and The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature (2009). She is currently working on a book on twenty-first-century Scottish writing.
