The Edinburgh Companion to the Millennial Novel
Edited by Loïc Bourdeau, Christopher Lloyd
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The first Companion to comprehensively analyse millennial fiction
Offers a global framework for thinking about the dominant forms and preoccupations of writing by millennial authors
Brings together emerging and established scholars from literary and cultural studies
Engages with major theoretical developments—in queer studies, post-colonial studies, affect studies, narratology, race studies, etc.—to better understand the genre and millennial sociality
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The ‘millennial novel’ is a term and genre that is at once over-debated and under-examined. As the first major book to survey and map out the millennial novel across multiple countries, this Companion offers a global framework for thinking about the dominant forms and preoccupations of writing by millennial authors. Scholars of contemporary literature will benefit from its breadth of investigation – across issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, family, social structures, nationhood and literary form – as well as its detailed studies of particular novels and authors, including Brit Bennett, Ocean Vuong, Ottessa Moshfegh, Sally Rooney, Raven Leilani and Ling Ma. Overall, The Edinburgh Companion to the Millennial Novel shows that millennial fiction is neither homogeneous nor impervious to previous socio-literary movements. In turn, it complicates our understanding of the genre, attempts to define the contours of contemporary literary production and reflects on twenty-first-century sociality.
Review:
"Bourdeau and Lloyd’s expertly compiled volume provides a compassionate, capacious and complex analysis of the over-discussed but under-analysed concept of the millennial and its relationship to long-form fiction. Taking the term as a marketing and generational provocation, it boldly expands our understanding of the millennial’s potential and limitations." – Rachel Sykes, University of Birmingham.
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Adulting, Generational Blame and a World of Uncertainty
or The Case for the Millennial Novel
Loïc Bourdeau and Christopher Lloyd
1. ‘My generation, her generation, blah blah blah’: Forms of Generationality in the Millennial Novel
Richard Bingham
2. Modest Temporalities: Time and Tense in Millennial Novels
Alexandra Ksenofontova
3. Dialectic Conflict and Dialogic Becoming: Millennial Authors and the (Re)Negotiation of a Queer Arab Narrative
Rashad Nimr and Michael Karam
4. Trauma, Protest and the Dream: The Australian Millennial Novel
Jessica Gildersleeve
5. (Queer) Passing and Diasporic Aesthetics in Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half and Kama La Mackerel’s ZOM-FAM
Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy
6. Writing Millennial Lives at the Intersection of Class, Queerness and Refugeeism: Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Alexandra Kurmann
7. Édouard Louis: Repetition and Transformation
Marieke Mueller
8. You-narration and Anticipatory Shame in the Millennial Novel
Denise Wong
9. Choosing Marriage, Choosing Motherhood: (Be)Longing as Resistance in Alice Zeniter’s Jusque dans nos bras (Take This Man) and Sophie Mackintosh’s Blue Ticket
Sonja Stojanovic
10. From Millennial Matrophobia to Millennial Matricide in Sophie White’s Where I End
Julie Rodgers
11. ‘I’m not a junkie or something’: Millennial Fiction’s Depressed Women and Self-Medication in Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Emma Woodhead
12. ‘Love is Communist’: Sally Rooney and the Form of the Couple
Rebecca Waalkes
13. Hardly Working or Working Hard: Registering the Long Downturn in Halle Butler’s The New Me and Raven Leilani’s Luster
Will Berrington
14. The Work of Writing/Writing of Work in the Millennial Novel
Katie da Cunha Lewin
15. ‘Made in China’: Racial Capitalism and the Spectre of Coolie Labour in Ling Ma’s Severance
Harriet Stilley
16. Anxiety of Form: The Millennial Novel and Postsecular Politics
Ryan Lackey
17. Faith is Not beyond the Self: Reconciling Contradictory Impulses in Fatima Daas’s La Petite Dernière
Mrinmoyee Bhattacharya
18. Desi Millennial Fiction: Refusal, Expectations and Misunderstanding in the Age of Terror
Jay N. Shelat
19. After the Flood: Rising Waters as the New Normal in Millennial Ecofiction
Marc André Fortin
20. Solastalgia contra the Good Life: The Failures of Dutch Millennial Climate Fiction
Jesse van Amelsvoort
Coda: What Comes After the Millennial Novel?
Loïc Bourdeau and Christopher Lloyd
A Millenial Novel Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index