The 2010s

Nick Bentley is Senior Lecturer in English literature at Keele University, UK. He is author of Contemporary British Fiction: A Readers Guide to Criticism (2018); Martin Amis: Writers and Their Work (2015); Contemporary British Fiction (2008); and Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (2007). He is editor of British Fiction of the 1990s (2005), and co-editor of two volumes in Bloomsbury’s British Fiction: The Decades Series – The 2000s (2015), and The 1950s (2019). In addition, he has published 40 journal articles and book chapters on postwar and contemporary literature. Emily Horton is a lecturer in World Literatures in English at Brunel University, UK. Her research interests include contemporary fiction in English, specializing in trauma and affect theory; genre and popular fiction; and fictional explorations of globalization and cosmopolitanism. Her first monograph, Contemporary Crisis Fictions, was published in 2014. She has also co-edited two volumes: The 1980s: A Decade in Contemporary British Fiction, with Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson (2014); and Ali Smith, with Monica Germanà (2013). Nick Hubble is Professor of Modern and Contemporary English at Brunel University London. Nick is the author of the monographs Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (2006; second edition 2010) and The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (2017); the co-author of Ageing, Narrative and Identity (2013); and the co-editor of seven books with Bloomsbury Academic: The Science Fiction Handbook (2013), London in Contemporary British Fiction (2016), and five volumes in British Fiction: The Decades Series – The 1970s (2014), The 1990s (2015), The 2000s (2015), The 1950s (2019), and The 1930s (forthcoming 2021). Philip Tew is Professor of English (Post-1900 Literature) at Brunel University London. He has written, co-written, edited and co-edited over twenty five scholarly volumes, fifteen of which are published by Bloomsbury Academic, including: Reading Zadie Smith (2013); Ageing, Narrative and Identity (2013); Jonathan Coe (2018); and Growing Old With the Welfare State (2019); as well as in British Fiction: The Decades Series – The 1970s (2014), The 1980s (2015), The 1990s (2015), The 2000s (2015), The 1960s (2019), and The 1940s (forthcoming 2021). Tew has published two novels, Afterlives (2019) and Clark Gable and His Plastic Duck (2020) and a volume of novellas, Fragmentary Lives (2020).

Contributors
Series Editors’ Preface
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Fiction of the 2010s in the Context of a Country in Transition
Emily Horton, Nick Hubble, Nick Bentley and Philip Tew

1. Fictions of the Break Up
Nick Hubble

2. Fiction in the Age of Distraction: Reading and Attention in the 2010s
Alice Bennett

3. Border Crossings: Diasporic British Fiction of the 2010s
Emily Horton

4. ‘Defining it is a Struggle’: Working-Class Fiction in the 2010s
Matti Ron

5. What’s to-day? Politics and Typography in Ali Smith’s Decade
Tory Young

6. The ‘Teenie’ Novels of Jonathan Coe: Intertextuality, Satire, Parody, Farce and Irony Philip Tew

7. ‘The English Problem’: Reading the Body Politic in Post-Brexit Fictions
Kristian Shaw

8. Inexhaustible Literature? Contemporary Experimental Approaches in Literature
Mark P. Williams

9. Speculative Fiction of the 2010s
Anna McFarlane

10. The Neo-mythological Novel: Re-writing the Epic in Contemporary British Fiction.
Nick Bentley

Timeline of Works
Timeline of National Events
Timeline of International Events
Biographies of Writers
Index