Parution sur la littérature anglaise contemporaine

(Re-)Mapping London
Visions of the Metropolis in the Contemporary Novel in English
ouvrage collectif, sous la direction de Vanessa Guignery - Editions Publibook.

Présentation du livre par l'éditeur :

How do English novelists represent London? How do their characters move in this space of life and death, madness and violence, beauty and terror? Which interactions appear between them and the urban space, the streets, the squares, the dwellers? This volume questions the writing of the English capital from two viewpoints, depending on whether the authors are British native Londoners or come from the ex-colonial countries (including children of immigration). Two points of view which permit to grasp a subtle panorama of the city.

The aim of this collection is to explore representations of London in contemporary literature from two main perspectives: the city as observed by British-born Londoners and the new multicultural London. The British capital is sometimes presented as a labyrinthine, hostile and even occult city which is now no longer the centre of the Empire and is a place of chaos, decay, disorder, corruption and alienation. But it can also be considered in a creative and dynamic perspective as the source of endless imagination and regeneration, as the place for growth and change, for new beginnings and possibilities. This volume examines fresh ways of re-mapping the metropolis and redefining its contours in novels from the 1960’s to the present, with special focus on Graham Swift, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Peter Ackroyd, Will Self, Caryl Phillips, Doris Lessing, Jenny Diski, Tibor Fischer and Monica Ali.

Vanessa Guignery is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary English Literature at the University of La Sorbonne in Paris. She is the author of several books and essays on the work of Julian Barnes, including "The Fiction of Julian Barnes" (Macmillan, 2006), and "Conversations with Julian Barnes" (Mississippi Press, 2009), co-edited with Ryan Roberts. She has published articles on Arundhati Roy, Jeanette Winterson, Alain de Botton, David Lodge, Jonathan Coe, and Michèle Roberts, as well as a monograph on B.S. Johnson (Presses Universitaires de la Sorbonne, 2009). She has co-edited with François Gallix collections of essays on crime fiction, travel writing, literary prizes and on the work of Graham Greene.