Contemporary aesthetics is characterized by generic mixing on the
level of both form and content. The barriers between different
media and different genres have been broken down in all literary
art forms, whether it be theatre, poetry, or the novel. While the
publishing industry is increasingly keen to label novels according
to genre or sub-genre ("Chick Lit", "Lad Lit", "Gay fiction",
"Scottish fiction", "New Historical Fiction", "Crime fiction",
"Post-9/11 Fiction"), the novel itself (and novelists) persist in
resisting generic categorizations as well as inviting them. Is this
a move towards a new artistic liberty or does it simply testify to
a confusion of identity? The "aesthetic supermarket" evoked by
Lodge in 1992 does indeed seem to sum up the variety of choices
open to writers of fiction today and a literary landscape
characterized by crossover and hybridization. The familiar
dialectic of realism versus experimentation has segued into a
middle ground of consensus which is neither radical nor populist,
but both at the same time. The techniques of postmodernism have
become selling points for novels, and the Postmodern Condition
itself seems little more than a narrative posture marketed for an
increasingly wide audience. Whether they have recourse to a
"repertoire of imposture" (Amis, Self, Winterson), as Richard
Bradford would have it (The Novel Now, 2007), in other words "the
abandonment of any obligation to explain or justify their
excursions from credulity and mimesis", or, like the New Puritans,
make use of narrative minimalism in order to foreground their own
peculiarities, contemporary novelists consistently draw attention
to the fundamental instability of narrative process and genre.The
much-feared apocalypse of the novel has failed to take place with
the arrival of the new millennium, but generic game-playing and
flickering, narrative hesitation and uncertainty continue to pose
the question of what constitutes a novel today and to challenge its
identity in a world where all culture is increasingly public,
increasingly contested and increasingly multifarious. Thanks to
theoretical approaches as well as analyses of specific works, this
collection of essays aims to examine the concepts of generic
instability and cross-fertilization, of narrative postures and
impostures, and their constant redefinition of identity, which
contaminates the very concept of genre. It demonstrates the
diversity of generic practices in the novel today and furnishes us
with undeniable evidence of how generic instability is
fundamentally constitutive of the contemporary novel's identity.
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