The term 'multiculturalism' has been widely quoted to explain and study transnational networks and cultural changes on a global scale. This book focuses on the application of multicultural theories ...and perspectives in the field of literature and particularly in contemporary narratives. Bringing together ten studies which blur the limits of conventional discourse, and employing an interdisciplinary approach to address research problems using methods and insights borrowed from multiple disciplines, it features theoretical and analytical writings on multiculturalism and its traces in literatures that subvert the essentialist binary frameworks of ethnicity, race, nation and identity in a variety of texts. These include Martin Amis's The Pregnant Widow, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Salman Rushdie's Midnights Children and Shame, Hanif Kureishi's Something to Tell You, J. G. Ballard's High-Rise, Lady Annie Brassey's Sunshine and Storm in the East; or, Cruises to Cyprus and Constantinople, and Sir Henry Blount's A Voyage into the Levant. Approaching theoretical issues concerning multiculturalism from multiple perspectives and looking for its traces in different time periods and genres, this book will be of interest for scholars and researchers working in the fields of literature and cultural studies, as well as students studying in the same fields and the general reader.
This paper analyses the representation of unfulfilled creative vocations in contemporary American fiction using career construction theory, which emerged after the 2007 economic crisis when large ...numbers of people sought new forms of vocational guidance. It argues that a number of American novelists started to portray changing or unfulfilled creative vocations in fiction as a response to the overall changes in American society caused by the crisis. This means that career construction theory and the fictional portrayal of frustrated vocations have a common origin, so that the former can usefully be applied to our interpretation of the latter. The paper undertakes such work by applying specific components of career construction theory to interpretation and analysis of particular texts. Specifically, it applies theoretical insight by Mark Savickas, John Holland, Peter McIlveen and Kobus Maree to analysis of Joshua Ferris's novel Then We Came to the End (2007); Siri Hustvedt's The Blazing World (2014); Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings (2013) and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010). Overall it argues that career construction theory is a potentially fertile body of work capable of informing our understanding of the fictional portrayal of creative vocations in new and innovative ways.
This study explores how British identity has been explored and renegotiated by contemporary writers. It starts by examining the new emphasis on space and place that has emerged in recent cultural ...analysis, and shows how this spatial emphasis informs different literary texts. Having first analysed a series of novels that draw an implicit parallel between the end of the British Empire and the break-up of the unitary British state, the study explores how contemporary writing in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales contributes to a sense of nationhood in those places, and so contributes to the break-up of Britain symbolically. Dix argues that the break-up of Britain is not limited to political devolution in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It is also an imaginary process that can be found occurring on a number of other conceptual coordinates. Feminism, class, regional identities and ethnic communities are all terrains on which different writers carry out a fictional questioning of received notions of Britishness and so contribute in different ways to the break-up of Britain.
Although intangible, authorial careers are nevertheless material entities that have to be constructed in order to exist and that can be analysed to generate critical understanding of the creative ...works produced within them. Yet until recently, very little research or scholarly attention had been devoted to the concept of the authorial career as such. This paper argues that the body of work known as career construction theory, which originated in social psychology at the end of the twentieth century, can be used to discuss authorial careers in order to illuminate the relationship between life stages and writing practice in new ways. This is because career construction posits individuals as metaphorical 'authors' of their own life stories, with career counsellors acting as co-authors of the next chapter in an individual's career narrative during times of career uncertainty or vocational change. By identifying certain life themes - or macro-narratives - that transcend the concerns or issues that preoccupy authors at precise stages in their careers (or micro-narratives), it draws attention to a complex dual time frame on which authorial careers are based, emphasising a combination of sameness and difference over time.
Chapter 3 expands existing media research in the area of identity performance by arguing that the visual presentation of the self is a form of social interaction. Through a discussion of the YouTube ...community of GoPro camera users, the chapter first finds that people share videos to document an event that has happened and to demonstrate that it has happened, and then to transcend this documentary function because the aggregation of multiple different media accounts makes it possible to witness more in virtual form than can be empirically experienced (and apprehended) in real time. ...our online selves often fail to align either partially or completely with our internalized image of ourselves, and a variety of tensions arise as a result. ...in the final chapter, she recapitulates the central arguments of the book: namely, that the concept of accounting itself makes it possible to trace connections between forms of testimonial practice in different forms and genres over time; but that the increased capacity, heightened speed, and diffused ownership of media accounting made possible by the digital technologies on which social media depend gives a particular urgency to the online accounting of everyday life in the present.
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