Crosshatching

boundary crossing in the post-millennial British boom

Jude Roberts

pp. 183-196

in: Siân Adiseshiah, Rupert Hildyard (eds), Twenty-first century fiction, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

This chapter will discuss the ways in which China Miéville and Iain Banks use the formal properties of the genres in and across which they are working to reinforce the explicitly political content of their novels. The key claim I want to pursue here is that these novels point towards interesting developments for British fiction in the twenty-first century. Their politically engaged, plot-driven, boundary-crossing narratives emphasise ways in which popular culture can comment and reflect on its content and context. This connection between popular culture and politics is nothing new, of course, but the focus on it, the ways in which these narratives challenge their readers to engage critically with the (arguably) equally fictional narratives presented by those in positions of socio-economic and political power in the twenty-first century can be considered to be one of the defining characteristics of contemporary genre fiction in Britain.