In the wake of the October 2023 escalation of the Israel–Palestine conflict, NYC-based graffiti bomber Miss17 visualized her solidarity with the Palestinian people by filling her tag name with the colors of the Palestinian flag. In 2024, the largest all-woman graffiti crew in the United States – Few & Far – completed a mural with a feminist take on the “Forbidden Fruit” idea, which gave the grrlz the space to publicly claim their opposition to the genocide of the Palestinian people by painting watermelons – a symbol of Palestinian resistance similar in effect and meaning to the flag. In this chapter, visual arts scholar Dr. Pabón-Colón examines these works, the sociopolitical context in which they were made, and their reception on social media to argue that by performing their feminism in their graffiti these grrlz rejected US imperialism in favor of modeling transnational feminist solidarity.

Will Self has emerged as one of the most important and indeed most industrious of British authors of recent times, having written several novels, novellas and collections of short stories, to say nothing of the many volumes of collected journalism. Self 's first book, The Quantity Theory of Insanity, was published to general acclaim in 1991, winning the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. His multifaceted career has included appearances on a television game show, book reviewing and working as the restaurant critic for The Observer. Self shares his description of the 'gallimaufry of grotesques' of William Burroughs's Junky with Ian Wharton's description of his friends in My Idea of Fun. Self 's comments in an article entitled 'New Crack City' make clear his debt to Burroughs in his approach to writing about drug use.

The various betrayals, manipulations and acts of cruelty that constitute the representative events of The Old Boys are typical of William Trevor's England. Due to the juxtaposition of his personal history with elements of the English national story, Hilditch becomes the most striking embodiment of the complex moral imbalances that the precarious fate of the person in Trevor's England connote. As Elizabeth Alone and Other People's Worlds suggest, an important aspect of Trevor's English novels of recovery and reintegration is the emergence of female protagonists. As Trevor's oeuvre evolves, the drama of reconciliation becomes at once more subtle and more pressing, lending to his later English novels a distinct, though typically understated, moral tone. Though the pilgrimages to recuperation that supply the narrative pattern to the majority of Trevor's later English novels is an important means of animating the moral landscape, its consequences are only attested to implicitly and provisionally.

The presence of the grotesque, with its characteristic contradictory elements, in Ian McEwan's fiction is most easily visible in the author's use of grotesque images and scenarios. McEwan's first novel The Cement Garden offers a sustained engagement with issues of subject formation. The city of Venice forms a readily recognisable, albeit anonymous site for McEwan's second novel The Comfort of Strangers. McEwan is also interested in the temporal contraction involved in regression, and his fiction frequently evokes the 'timelessness' of childhood, or of a regression to a childlike state. The idea that social situations often disguise a deeper, less pleasant reality is one that recurs again and again in McEwan's work. This is evident from The Comfort of Strangers through to The Child in Time and The Innocent to Enduring Love and Amsterdam.

This chapter reads Anthills of the Savannah against Achebe's pamphlet The Trouble With Nigeria, drawing out the notably hesitant and fragmentary texture of the novel. Examining Achebe's portrait of dictatorship, it traces elements from Nigeria's recent history, as well as the various military leaders of which Achebe had experience including the Biafran leader Emeka Ojukwu. Exploring Achebe's changed gender consciousness in Anthills, it concludes by considering the novel's prescription for a redemptive new order, questioning its adequacy as a response to Nigeria's entrenched problems and divisions.

This chapter provides a brief account of the historical tradition of the contemporary British grotesque in literature and the visual arts. Debates about the relationship between the realist novel and the grotesque have often crystallised around the figure of Charles Dickens. The logic of carnival is also the logic of the grotesque. The chapter examines the works of Angela Carter, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Iain Banks, Will Self and Toby Litt as well as the links between their texts. It elaborates the set of core qualities through an examination of manifestations of the grotesque throughout history and in the light of work on the subject by critics such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Arthur Clayborough and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. The chapter also engages in the critical debates surrounding the use of the term 'grotesque'.

The introduction contextualises representations of female oddity between the 1850s and the Second World War in relation to debates within queer theory about heteronormativity, queer subjectivities, relations between women and gender non-conformity. It tracks changing attitudes to female singleness in relation to the rise of feminism, considering debates around women's work, sexuality and suffrage. It introduces debates around female auto/biography and queer auto/biography, and considers the ways in which modernity was conceptualised in this period.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is frequently thought of as a text that emerged from the 1816 Geneva summer, when Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and others gathered in Switzerland in an important creative moment that included a lightning strike of inspiration. This essay seeks to look at the novel in the context of Mary Shelley’s composition process in the late 1810s, whereby the book was carefully sculpted into its final form by her wide reading and thinking, then her redrafting and literary labour, all influenced by collaborative literary environments. Mary Shelley’s process is also explored in relation to her first publication, the travelogue History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817), and two fair-copy manuscript pages of that book. As such, an attempt to look at the young Mary Shelley in the 1810s considers her wider activities and her significance as an author beyond simply the Frankenstein myth and its initial conception.

Analysis of two novels that seek to re-establish ‘forgotten’ elements of Irish history: Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry (1999) and Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys (2001). Both novels excavate feminist and queer narratives that have been hidden behind the façade of Ireland’s conservative national narrative by establishing the prominence of such narratives during the 1916 Easter Rising. Reading both novels through the lens of spectrality—a narrative mode that conflates temporalities, events, and peoples—and in the context of Ireland’s waning conservatism at the end of the Twentieth Century offers a clearer notion of how both texts reconsider the founding mythology of Irish culture. At Swim, Two Boys places gay lovers and ideals of homosexuality at the absolute core of the Easter Rising, thereby implying the revolutionary notion that the Irish Republic was in fact founded upon the principles of queer politics. A Star Called henry, while certainly invested in acknowledging class divisions in early twentieth-century Dublin, also seeks to recover feminism as a logical extension, or corollary, to nationalism.