Literature and The Contemporary Fictions and Theories of the Present

At the end of the century, much criticism has become devoted to `last things': the end of history, the end of the subject, the end of the novel, the end, even, of the end. Literature and the Contemporary, in contrast, aims to provide through twelve essays evidence of the way in which the literature of the 1990s is constantly engaging in questions of memory and history and the representation of time in the present day.The essays in the book survey theories of temporality from various cultural and philosophical standpoints, and represent critics writing from feminist, postcolonial and `queer' perspectives discussing literature in `our time'. The collection addresses such central issues as the politics of memory, colonial legacies, women's time, racial and sexual identities in the 1990s, and covers a wide range of contemporary authors, works and issues, some of which are treated for the first time. Among the contemporary works discussed are the prize-winning books Graham Swift's Last Orders, Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces, and Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres.While discussing some of the most significant novels of the 1990s, this collection also offers a diverse yet cohesive critique of the millennial leanings of much `postmodernist' criticism, which it argues should be replaced by more variously nuanced engagements with literature and the contemporary.

Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors 1. Hurry Up Please It's Time: Introducing the Contemporary PART ONE: TIME TODAY 2. The Impossibility of the Present; Or, form the Contemporary to the Contemporal 3. The Politics of Time Modernity, Postmodernity 4. Now, Here, This 5. Melancholic Modernity and Contemporary Greif: The Novels of Graham Swift Memory 6. Memory Recovered/Recovered Memory 7. `We come after': Remembering the Holocaust PART TWO: INTERSECTION The Post-colonial contemporary 8. The Rhizome of Post-Colonial Discourse 9. The Dialect of Myth and History in the Post-Colonial Contemporary: Soyinka's `A Dance of the Forests' Feminism 10. The Gender Differential, Again and Not Yet 11. Back to the Future: Revisiting Kristeva's `Women's Time' Queering Now 12. Crossing the Present, Narrative, Alterity and Gender in Postmodern Fiction 13. A Queer Spirit of the Times Index

Roger Luckhurst teaches in the Department of English, at Birkbeck College, University of London. Peter Marks teaches in the Department of English at the University of Sydney, Australia.