David Mitchell is one of the most critically acclaimed authors in contemporary global writing. Novels such as Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks demonstrate the author's dazzling literary technique in an oeuvre that crosses genres, genders and borders, moving effortlessly through time and space. David Mitchell: Contemporary Critical Perspectives brings together leading scholars of contemporary fiction to guide readers through the full range of the author's writings, including discussions of all of his novels to-date plus his shorter fictions, essays and libretti. As well as offering extended coverage of Mitchell's most popular work, Cloud Atlas, the authors explore Mitchell's genre-hopping techniques, world-making aesthetics, and engagements with key contemporary issues such as globalization, empire, the environment, disability, trauma and technology. In addition, this book includes an expansive interview with David Mitchell as well as a guide to further reading to help students and readers alike explore the works of this tremendously inventive writer.

Since the publication of Ghostwritten (1999), David Mitchell has rapidly established himself as one of the most inventive and important British novelists of the 21st century. In this landmark study, Rose Harris-Birtill reveals the extent to which Mitchell has created an interconnected fictional world across the full run of his writing. Covering Mitchell's complete fictions, from bestselling novels such as Cloud Atlas (2004), The Bone Clocks (2014) and number9dream (2001), to his short stories and his libretti for the operas Sunken Garden and Wake, this book examines how Buddhist influences inform the ethical worldview that permeates his writing. Using a comparative theoretical model drawn from the Tibetan mandala to map Mitchell's fictional world, Harris-Birtill positions Mitchell as central to a new generation of post-secular writers who re-examine the vital role of belief in galvanizing action amidst contemporary ecological, political and humanitarian crises. David Mitchell's Post-Secular World features two substantial new interviews with the author, a chronology of his fictions and a selected bibliography of important critical writings on his work.

The outcome of the first international conference on David Mitchell's writing, this collection of critical essays focuses on his first three novels - 'Ghostwritten', 'number9dream' and 'Cloud Atlas' - to provide an analysis of Mitchell's complex narrative techniques and the literary, political and cultural implications of his work.

The Poetics of Empowerment in David Mitchell’s Novels combines the investigation of David Mitchell’s novels with the introduction of a new critical concept to literary studies: empowerment. Aiming to situate and establish empowerment firmly within the context of literary studies, it offers the first framework and definition for reading fictional texts with the lens of empowerment and applies it in the analysis of discourse, the fictional characters, and the role of the reader in Mitchell’s novels. Drawing on narratological analysis, cognitive approaches to literature, and reader-response theory, it features close readings of Cloud Atlas (2004), Black Swan Green (2006), and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) and dissects the author’s strategies, poetics, and agenda of empowering fiction. This book argues for an inherent, indissoluble connection between empowerment and the telling of stories and demonstrates how literary studies can benefit from a serious engagement with empowerment—and how such an engagement can stimulate new responses to fiction and put literary studies in conversation with other disciplines.

This book will focus on analyzing the different aspects of Japan's representation in the novels of Haruki Murakami and David Mitchell. It is proven that Murakami creates and recreates Japan without implementing any orientalist features or exotic imagery. In the works of both authors, the intent to depict a new world of Japan stripped of traditional stereotypical traits becomes clear. The difference between Murakami and Mitchell's representation of Japan lies in the difference between Japan as seen by the Japanese and Japan as seen by modern Westerners, but both are 'correct' images of Japan. It is a recreation of the global image of Japan. In that sense, the texts of Murakami and Mitchell are complementary representations of Japan through East-West cultural dialogue. Studying the representations of Japan and Japanese national character helps to understand the role of Murakami and Mitchell in the formation of a new image of Japan, the de-stereotyping of anachronistic ideas about Japanese national exclusivity, enriching by doing so the world literature with new visions of the country and its culture. The purpose of the comparative analysis of English and Japanese literary works performed in this work is to reveal both deep analogies and differences in the representation of the image of Japan, actualizing the national specificity of the texts. This research advances the understanding of how both general and specific components of literary representations of Japan and Japaneseness are manifested in the East-West cultural dialogue.