The Postmodern Chronotope is an innovative interdisciplinary study of the contemporary. It will be of special interest to anyone interested in relations between postmodernism, geography and contemporary fiction. Some claim that postmodernism questions history and historical bases to culture; some say it is about loss of affect, loss of depth models, and superficiality; others claim it follows from the conditions of post-industrial society; and others cite commodification of place, Disneyfication, simulation and post-tourist spectacle as evidence that postmodernism is wedded to late capitalism. Whatever postmodernism is, or turns out to have been, it is bound up in rethinking and reworking space and time, and Paul Smethurst's intervention here is to introduce the postmodern chronotope as a term through which these spatial and temporal shifts might be apprehended. The postmodern chronotope constitutes a postmodern world-view and postmodern way of seeing. In a sense it is the natural successor to a modernist way of seeing defined through cubism, montage and relativity. The book is arranged as follows: - Part 1 is an interdisciplinary study casting a wide net across a range of cultural, social and scientific activity, from chaos theory to cinema, from architecture to performance art, from IT to tourism. - Part 2 offers original readings of a selection of postmodern novels, including Graham Swift's Waterland and Out of this World, Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor and First Light, Alasdair Gray's Lanark, J. M. Coetzee's Foe, Marina Warner's Indigo, Caryl Phillips' Cambridge, and Don DeLillo's The Names and Ratner's Star.

This study looks at the complex relationship between postmodernism and the fantastic in contemporary British fiction and shows that a new type of the fantastic arises in postmodernism. Arguing against interpretations that view postmodernism as inherently fantastic, it seeks to define the postmodern fantastic as a narrative mode that is influenced by certain traits both of the traditional fantastic and of literary postmodernism but does not simply conflate both. In the first theoretical part, a number of theories of the fantastic and of postmodernism are used to set the fantastic apart from other non-mimetic forms of literature and to create a model of the postmodern fantastic that postulates the totalisation of the fantastic in postmodernism. In the second part of this study, this model is applied to a number of contemporary British texts which are particularly susceptible to this form of the fantastic due to several characteristics such as their muted kind of postmodernism and their frequent construction of parallel worlds. The analysis of these texts focuses on four thematic fields of the postmodern fantastic: the figure of the other as defined by Bernhard Waldenfels, time and history, text and textuality and the development of the Todorovian pure fantastic. Finally, the question of the death of the fantastic in postmodernism is examined.

One number each year includes Annual bibliography of Commonwealth literature.