Contemporary British fiction

Fiction from the 1970s onwards.

DAVID LODGE often satirises academia in general in his campus novels. Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses and its sequel Small World: An Academic Romance which have been adapted into television series. Changing Places is a comic novel about six-month academic exchanged between fictional universities of two 40-year-old professors. His novels are humorous but present also a lot of literary theory in a way an ordinary reader can grasp it.

MARTIN AMIS, the son of Kingsley Amis, was an experimental writer dealing with bizarre and dark aspects of life. Time's Arrow is a  story told backwards. It starts with the death of the main character and ends with his birth which is presented as his death.

IAN MCEWAN /jůwn/ is very popular and his books were adapted into films. He writes thrillers, like Atonement and Amsterdam, full of thrillers full of interesting relevant ideas, engages with the latest developments and science and interested in ethical problems and connects all that into dynamic action package.

In The Cement Garden the parents of four children dies. In order to avoid being taken into custody, the children hide their mother's death from the outside world by encasing her corpse in cement in their basement. Two of the siblings, a teenage boy and girl, descend into an incestuous relationship, while the younger son starts to experiment with transvestism

ANGELA CARTER is known for her magical realism = stories with magical setting but bringing up many topics. She rewrites existing fairy tales but with bleeding ending and feminist perspective.

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is a collection of many re-written fairly tales like The Company of Wolves, also made into a movie. The Magic Toyshop has also been adapted into a movie.

In a short story The Bloody Chamber, a teenage girl marries an older, wealthy French Marquis, whom she does not love. When he takes her to his castle, she learns that he enjoys sadistic pornography and takes pleasure in her embarrassment. She is a talented pianist and when a young blind piano tuner hears her music, he falls in love with her. There is one particular room she is forbidden to enter by the Marquis but on his absence, he enters it anyway. and discovers the bodies of his previous wives. When the Marquis returns home he discovers that she has entered the room, he tries to add her to his collection of corpses through beheading. The brave piano tuner is willing to stay with her even though he knows he will not be able to save her. She is saved at the last moment at the end of the story by her mother who arrives and shoots the Marquis. The girl, her mother and the piano tuner go on to live together, and the girl uses her now considerable fortune to convert the castle into a school for blind children.

FAY WELDON is a feminist who portrays contemporary woman trapped in oppressive situations caused by patriarchal system like. The novel Female Friends.  

Weekend is about a caring wife Martha who has to do everything and has no time for herself. The society would think she must be happy, she has lovely kids, loving husband and good work but she is under constant pressure. Still, Martha feels his husband Martin is not satisfied with her and acts like everything she does it simply expected of a wife. When she wants to work, he reluctantly agrees but she has to pay for basically everything in the household. On Friday the whole families goes to the country and again Martha has to prepare everything, Martin only drives and complains how hard his week was but she has to do much more than him and it is because of him her driving license was suspended. At the cottage, Martin’s friends arrive as well and his friend has new lover Katie. The friend left his caring wife, similar to Martha, for younger attractive girl. Katie does only what what she wants, Martha is possibly jealous. Everybody is a hypocrite, they are telling Martha to leave things and relax but in the end everything is up to her. When her daughter gets her first period, Martha is sad. She is afraid her daughter will meet with the same fate in future.

JAMES GRAHAM BALLARD is a writer of dystopias, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental development. His semi- autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun is a relatively conventional war novel about a Japanese concentration camp in WW2. Kingdom Come is a dystopian novel that deals with the supposed blurry line between consumerism and fascism.

Postmodernists

Writing of these authors is based on rewriting history from fresh perspective but they also state that to give a complete of version of history is not possible because it is filtered thought the minds of different kinds of consciousness.

JULIAN BARNES mainly focuses on the re-imagination of life stories, redefinition and rewriting of history using a variety of materials and a collage.

A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapter is a collection of short stories in different styles, most fictional, some historical. England, England a satirical novel with farcical elements about the idea of replicating England in a theme park and questions ideas of national identity, invented traditions, the creations of myths and the authenticity of history.

JANETTE WINTERSON is a feminist writer, rewriting history with feminine version. It shows how history with a feminine perspective gave a different picture than a masculine version. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is semi-autobiographical. It traces her childhood and adolescence when she openly admitted her lesbianism for which she was banned from home. In The Stone Gods she even went into post apocalyptic sci-fi genre. Its main themes are the harshness of war, love in the controlled world and dehumanisation that technology brings. It warns against history's tendency to repeat itself and humanity's inability to learn from past mistakes.

Sci-fi, fantasy and comics

TERRY PRATCHETT worked in America as spokesman for a nuclear factory but after an accident which resulted in nuclear fear in America he quit the job and became a writer. He is Great Britain's best-selling author since 1990s, famous for his wit, parody and colourful imagination. He created a cycle of 40 books Discworld, the first novel was The Colour of Magic. On Good Omens he collaborated with Neil Gaiman, it is a comedy about the birth of the Antichrist.

ARTHUR C. CLARKE is a famous sci-fi author, a lifelong proponent of space travel, called the Prophet of the Space Age. His most famous book 2001: A Space Odyssey is about a space ship which flight to investigate a strange alien monolith near Saturn, adapted into a blockbuster movie.

DOUGLAS ADAMS is a humorist, famous for his five-volume sci-fi comedy cycle Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

ROALD DAHL is famous for his children fantasy books The Witches featuring a world where witches live in secret and eat children and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, featuring adventures of young boy Charlie inside the chocolate factory of eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka.

DAVID MITCHELL a became famous for his novel Cloud Atlas which consists of six nested stories that take the reader from the remote South Pacific in the nineteenth century to a distant, post-apocalyptic future. It was recently adapted into a successful movie.

J.K. ROWLING is currently one of the most translated authors in history for  seven-volume the Harry Potter series, the best-selling book series in history.

NEIL GAIMAN  is an author of many novels, comics, young adult and children books. The Sandman is a comic book series. It begins with the figure of Dream freed from 75 years of imprisonment, returns to take back his kingdom. Stardust a fantasy humorous novel, adapted into a movie. Coraline is a horror fantasy novella, made into a puppet film. The Graveyard Book is children’s fantasy and horror novel. American Gods blends ancient and modern mythology.

Snow, Glass, Apples presents an alternative story to the famous fairytale Snowhite. In this version, the evil queen is just a girl with a gift of seer who falls in love with the king who takes her to his castle and makes her his Queen. The King has a young daughter who is…in fact a vampire! The King soon falls ill and dies of numerous blood loses. The Queen orders to take the child to the wood during the day when she is weak and take her heart. However, the heart is still beating so the Queen realises the little vampire still lives. The woods become a dangerous place, people and even evil creatures being killed. She disguises as an old merchant who upon seeing the vampire leaves her merchandise behind – red apples soaker in her old blood and poison. The vampire girl tastes the apple and dies, the midgets place her into a glass coffin for display. Some years after, King of another kingdom comes to the castle but it seems he is not interested in the Queen much and they fail to have sex. The King leaves to find the vampire girl in the forest and makes love to her, thus removing the choking piece of apple from her throat. The vampire princess returns to the castle, convincing everybody that it was the queen who was evil and burning her on stake, creating a false fairytale.

  

ALAN MOORE is famous for making the already existing hero comic genre new and mature graphic novels. V for Vendetta echoes 1984 by George Orwell, a dystopian near-future of Britain, adapted into a film. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen returns to the monstrous heroes of Victorian literature (Mina Harker the vampire, Dorian Gray the immortal man, Captain Nemo and his submarine, Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde). From Hell is a detailed telling of Jack the Ripper. Watchmen is his most celebrated series that exceeds the limits of the pre-existing formula of comics without destroying the formula of superheroes.