The Neo-mythological Novel: Re-writing the Epic in Contemporary British Fiction

Bentley, Nicholas

Abstract

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.

Citation

Bentley, N. (2024). The Neo-mythological Novel: Re-writing the Epic in Contemporary British Fiction. In The 2010s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction (263-290). London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing

• Online Publication Date: Dec 18, 2024
• Publication Date: Feb 8, 2024
• Deposit Date: Jan 22, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 22, 2025
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Pages: 263-290
• Series Title: The Decades Series
• Book Title: The 2010s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction
• Chapter Number: 10
• ISBN: 978-1-3502-6821-0
• Public URL: https://keele-repository.worktribe.com/output/1018915
• Additional Information: In this chapter, in what is the first sustained study of what I term the neo-mythological novel, I want to read this new category of contemporary fiction with respect to two main areas. Firstly, as a development and combination of a series of other literary-critical trends in the longer contemporary period stretching back to (at least) the 1990s: the neo-Victorian and neo-historical novel; the concept of metamodernism; the focus on historiographic metafiction as a characteristic of postmodern literary practice; the popularity of magic realism; and the intersection of popular genres with so-called ‘serious’ literary fiction. Secondly, these novels consciously promote the use of epic and mythological sources as a way to engage with a number of contemporary social, cultural and political concerns of the last decade or so, namely feminist revisions of past classics in the wake of the #MeToo campaign; increased LGBTQ+ awareness and continued campaigns against homophobia as well as a cultural focus on transgender identities and experiences; the popularisation of critical race theory in response to movements such as Black Lives Matter, the Windrush scandal, decolonizing the curriculum, and an increased awareness of black history (including British involvement in the transatlantic slave trade); and a renewed interest in working-class culture driven by increased inequalities due to a decade of austerity. These topics have direct relevance to the readings I make in this chapter of four novels that appeared within two years of each other in the latter half of the 2010s: Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (2018), Haynes’s The Children of Jocasta (2017), Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017) and Johnson’s Everything Under (2018). Before discussing them, however, I want to expand on some of the trends in literary and cultural studies informing the new genre.