Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Fiction

Metafiction

Metafiction is fiction that foregrounds its own status as a constructed text, so that the work keeps reminding the reader that it is an artificial object. Its characteristic technique is breaking the boundary between the world of the story and the act of writing or reading, for example by letting the reader or the author appear inside the narrative. A mere shift in narrator or point of view is not metafiction, because many realist novels use such devices without exposing their own fictionality. Metafiction is closely tied to postmodern narrative, where self-reflexive play, fragmentation and the rejection of a single authoritative story are common. Key terms to keep apart are self-reflexive, meaning referring back to the text's own making, and frame-breaking, meaning crossing from the story world into the world of the writer or reader.

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, a British writer who was born in India, in Motihari, Bihar. Knowing that a writer of Anglo-Indian birth used a pseudonym is a common point in questions on English literature. His dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) introduced or popularised the terms Newspeak, Thoughtcrime and Doublespeak. The novel depicts a totalitarian future ruled by the Party under the figure of Big Brother, with constant surveillance and state control of language and thought. Do not confuse it with other works of the period: Animal Farm is an allegorical fable about the Russian Revolution, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is organised through conditioning rather than by a totalitarian regime, and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is concerned with censorship and book burning.

Man Booker Prize history

The Booker Prize, formerly known as the Man Booker Prize, is awarded annually for a novel written in English by a citizen of the Commonwealth, Ireland or Zimbabwe. The prize was sponsored by Booker McConnell, a British company whose origins lay in sugar plantations in British Guiana and which later diversified into engineering, shipping and the marketing of rum. The link between a colonial trading enterprise and a major literary prize is therefore a standard fact to remember. Indian winners include Arundhati Roy, who won for The God of Small Things, and Kiran Desai, who won for The Inheritance of Loss. Amitav Ghosh and Anita Desai, though major Indian novelists, have never won the prize.

Postcolonial rewriting of canonical novels

Postcolonial rewriting, often called writing back, retells a canonical English novel from the point of view of a character or group that the original silenced or marginalised. Two classic examples are J. M. Coetzee's Foe, which revisits the castaway story of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, which gives a voice to the Creole wife in Brontë's Jane Eyre. Novels that are original creations, such as Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy-Man or Ben Okri's The Famished Road, are not rewritings of a specific English canonical text, so they should not be confused with this practice.

Feminist magic realism

Feminist magic realism uses the mode of magic realism to present women's experience, memory and the history of oppression, treating the supernatural as part of everyday life. Toni Morrison is the central example, since her novels combine feminist concerns with magic realist techniques such as ghosts that inhabit the domestic space and flight as an image of liberation. Other women writers are often mistaken for it: Virginia Woolf's Orlando uses fantasy but belongs to modernism rather than magic realism, Kamala Markandaya writes social realist fiction, and Svetlana Alexievich writes documentary nonfiction.

James Joyce's fiction

James Joyce created Stephen Dedalus, a semi-autobiographical figure who is the protagonist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and reappears in Ulysses. The character was developed earlier in the draft novel Stephen Hero, which Joyce later reworked. Writers who are often confused with Joyce, such as H. G. Wells, P. G. Wodehouse and D. H. Lawrence, did not create this character, so questions asking who created Stephen Dedalus point to Joyce.