The 2010s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction

This volume relates the British fiction of the decade to the contexts in which it was written and received in order to examine and explain contemporary trends, such as the rise of a new working-class fiction, the ongoing development of separate national literatures of Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and shifts in modes of attention and reading.

From the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crash to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020, the 2010s have been a decade of an ongoing crisis which has penetrated every area of everyday life. Internationally, there has been an ongoing shift of global power from the US to China, and events and developments such as the election of Donald Trump as US President, the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the rise of the populist right across Europe and very gradually the incipient effects variously of AI. Nationally, there has been a decade of austerity economics punctuated by divisive referendums on Scottish independence and whether Britain should leave or remain in the EU.

Balancing critical surveys with in-depth readings of work by authors who have helped define this turbulent decade, including Nicola Barker, Anna Burns, Jonathan Coe, Alys Conran, Bernadine Evaristo, Mohsin Hamid, James Kelman, James Robertson, Kamila Shamsie, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith and Adam Thirlwell, among others, this volume illustrates exactly how their key themes and concerns fit within the social and political circumstances of the decade.

Nick Bentley is Senior Lecturer in English literature at Keele University, UK. He is author of Contemporary British Fiction: A Readers Guide to Criticism (2018); Martin Amis: Writers and Their Work (2015); Contemporary British Fiction (2008); and Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (2007). He is editor of British Fiction of the 1990s (2005), and co-editor of two volumes in Bloomsbury’s British Fiction: The Decades Series - The 2000s (2015), and The 1950s (2019). In addition, he has published 40 journal articles and book chapters on postwar and contemporary literature.

Emily Horton is a lecturer in World Literatures in English at Brunel University, UK. Her research interests include contemporary fiction in English, specializing in trauma and affect theory; genre and popular fiction; and fictional explorations of globalization and cosmopolitanism. Her first monograph, Contemporary Crisis Fictions, was published in 2014. She has also co-edited two volumes: The 1980s: A Decade in Contemporary British Fiction, with Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson (2014); and Ali Smith, with Monica Germanà (2013).

Nick Hubble is Professor of Modern and Contemporary English at Brunel University London. Nick is the author of the monographs Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (2006; second edition 2010) and The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (2017); the co-author of Ageing, Narrative and Identity (2013); and the co-editor of seven books with Bloomsbury Academic: The Science Fiction Handbook (2013), London in Contemporary British Fiction (2016), and five volumes in British Fiction: The Decades Series - The 1970s (2014), The 1990s (2015), The 2000s (2015), The 1950s (2019), and The 1930s (forthcoming 2021).

Philip Tew is Professor of English (Post-1900 Literature) at Brunel University London. He has written, co-written, edited and co-edited over twenty five scholarly volumes, fifteen of which are published by Bloomsbury Academic, including: Reading Zadie Smith (2013); Ageing, Narrative and Identity (2013); Jonathan Coe (2018); and Growing Old With the Welfare State (2019); as well as in British Fiction: The Decades Series - The 1970s (2014), The 1980s (2015), The 1990s (2015), The 2000s (2015), The 1960s (2019), and The 1940s (forthcoming 2021). Tew has published two novels, Afterlives (2019) and Clark Gable and His Plastic Duck (2020) and a volume of novellas, Fragmentary Lives (2020).