Contemporary Regional Fiction - Detailseite

While, as Dominic Head acknowledges in a recent book on the English rural novel, it might be counterintuitive to discuss literary texts with a distinctly regional or rural character in an age of globalisation and transnationalism (Head 2017: 19), recent years have nevertheless seen a growing body of literary texts that reinforce the idea of the regional. Alongside the continuing trend of metropolitan and cosmopolitan fictions, a new sense of the distinctly regional, marginal and rural has been emerging in contemporary British literature. While regional Englishness has frequently been discussed with respect to 19^th-century writers such as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, a new generation of writers has turned to the fringe regions beyond Britain’s urban centres. These include rural Wales in the novels of Niall Griffiths, Tom Bullough and Cynan Jones, the Midlands and the Black Country in the texts of Kerry Hadley-Pryce and Joel Lane, the fenlands in Daisy Johnson’s novels and short stories, or the rural North of Andrew Michael Hurley’s folk horror novels. These regional novels engage with isolation, the politics of village life and the region vis-à-vis the national, British devolution and Brexit, myth and folklore vs. modernity, and with the ecological issues in an age of late-stage industrialisation. Rather than being nostalgic or parochial fictions, then, these new regional texts critically engage with the pressing issues of (post-)modernity.

In this course, we will read novels and short stories by a range of writers that are representative of this recent turn to the regional in British literature. We will engage with the poetics and politics of contemporary regional fiction and we will particularly focus on (but not limit ourselves to) “genre” texts such as nature writing, thrillers, folk horror and eco-Gothic texts.

Reading:

Most material will be available on Moodle. Novels will have to be purchased individually. The list of texts will be provided during the first session.