Études britanniques contemporaines N°69 – New Materialisms

Déc 3, 2025

Études britanniques contemporaines N°69 – New Materialisms

Jean-Michel Ganteau
Parution : décembre 2025

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Présentation

This special section of Études britanniques contemporaines N°69 is the result of long and fruitful years of collaboration between specialists of contemporary British literature across France and beyond. Its very title encapsulates the gist of this collaboration, that has flourished as contemporary British literature itself gained renewed momentum, from the 1980s onwards and built on the complex and at times conflicted legacy of, first, Modernism and, then, the experimental fiction of the 1960s, but also, in the field of drama, from the energy of what was—probably too hastily—defined as ‘in-your-face theatre.

In the wake of the long-standing work done on this corpus of contemporary fiction, this selection of articles ponders what has been so unique about this moment of Britain’s literary production. The extraordinary critical production it has inspired says it all, from Steven Connor’s The English Novel in History (1996), to the Bloomsbury Decades series, edited by Emily Horton, Nick Huble or Leigh Wilson, to the readings of 21st–century literature offered by Peter Boxall or David James. With the rise of a new generation of fiction writers in the 1980s British literature had—at last, we might say—moved beyond the sterile opposition between experimentation and tradition. It no longer had to construct enemies and write from an embattled field. It did not even—one might suggest, borrowing John Barth’s words—need to have ‘the first half of the century’ (he was, interestingly, writing in 1980) ‘under their belt’ (Barth). They had probably even moved beyond Brian McHale’s famous opposition between Modernism’s epistemological concerns and ‘postmodernist’ ontological stakes (McHale).

So, what has been so special about this moment of Britain’s literary production? One may suggest: a capacity to re-articulate our relation to our present, a capacity not so much to reinvent representation, but to reinvigorate it from within and inhabit it with the renewed certainty that literature is accountable to the present, to our being in / of this historical moment.

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