Graduate Student, English
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Dr. Bruce Woodcock
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About
My thesis aims to examine the prolific and erratic fictions of Iain Banks and his alter-ego, Iain (M.) Banks, tracing a trajectory in post-1970s British fiction and identifying the many intertexts and analogues within his novels, as well as examining questions of genre, narrative and the idea of Banks as a chronicler of contemporary culture.
Iain Banks' position in contemporary British fiction is marked by his marked political awareness and the role that his fiction plays as a vehicle for the articulation of these various, deep-rooted positions. In this respect, Banks joins J.G. Ballard as an author operating in two different types of fiction which converge and depart at different points but still remain unacknowledged by literary prizes. Indeed, Banks' status as an author with a reputation for producing cult novels does not detract from the undoubted intellectual engagement in his work, indeed his persistent querying of perceived boundaries between the "popular" and the "literary" reinforce his reputation as an oppositional, controversial and strikingly individual novelist.
The overarching intention of the research is to identify a cartography and index of other writers who occupy this ‘space between' the rigidly drawn lines and boundaries of genre and canon, novelists whose texts provide an index of the contemporary cultural moment. These include but are by no means limited to Alan Warner, Ron Butlin, Irvine Welsh, Duncan McLean, Niall Griffiths, Rupert Thomson, Stewart Home, Alasdair Gray, Ken Macleod, Alastair Reynolds and China Mieville.
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