1. New Aspects of A Level English: Post-2000 Fiction Online resources added at the end!

2. Benefits? Literature ‘found alive!’ Present Different kinds of resources Not ‘established’ More: the opportunities of form…

3. Form, or, what’s contemporary about contemporary fiction? The Baton Form Realism… …and its opposition

4. Opposed to realism Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy James Joyce and Virginia Woolf/ Modernism writers Experimental writers of 1960s Magical realism Postmodernism – Experimentalism – Retelling

5. That was then, this is… ‘ Post-postmodern ’ – ‘Domesticated postmodernism’/return to narrative – Pastiches of genre Return to Modernism – Formal constraints e.g. ‘In a day novels’ – Modernist experimentalism Reality Hunger – “etymology of fiction is from fingere… meaning to ‘shape, fashion, form, or mould’ – Authenticity?

6. resources http://www.alluvium-journal.org/ Highly-rated online journal of 21 st C criticism http://gylphi.co.uk/c21/index.php Another one: not all on-line but much of it is… Much of my talk was adapted from: Robert Eaglestone, The Very Short Introduction to Contemporary Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).