CONTEMPORARY LITETRATURE

Question 1

referred to as the literary works written after the World War II.
It reflects current trends in life and culture and because these things change often, contemporary
literature changes often as well.
reflects author’s perspective: questions facts,
historical perspectives and presents two contradictory arguments side by side

Answer 1

Contemporary Literature

Question 2

Most of the themes of contemporary literature are related to the
overwhelming problems/issues of the present times:

Answer 2

globalization
race and gender
inequality
climate and environment
wars and terrorism
politics and economics
ethics and morals
mass culture and media
international crime and others

Question 3

Bakhtin’s (1981) definition of the novel as “a genre that is ever-questing, ever examining itself and subjecting its established forms to revision,”

one of its aims is to shed light on the
diversity of sub-genres that have proved central to developments in historical fiction, as well as
drama and poetry, since the 1980s.

Answer 3

Contemporary Historical Literature

Question 4

The issue also emphasizes the plurality of cultural/geographical settings that have
characterized historical literature since the 1980s, revealing these settings to be important for a
variety of reasons:

Answer 4

Role in both the development and contestation of modern socio-cultural forms.
 to celebrate sexual freedom, gender equality and both religious and political toleration.
 gesture towards further unrepresented locations, sites of similar events
 Shift in cultural/geographical as well as historical setting establish multiple links between migrant identities in different places

Question 5

often features hybrid and diasporic subjects, foregrounding the
historical, spatial, and performative conditioning of subjectivity in the wake of modernism’s
fracture of the unitary, rational and self-founding Cartesian subject.

Answer 5

Contemporary literature

Question 6

Postcolonial and psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivity inform a great part of contemporary
literature which focuses on

Answer 6

(auto)-biography
memory
trauma
the Holocaust;
experiences of displacement.

Question 7

In times of transformation, literature articulates and interprets their impact:

Answer 7

 rapid change or crisis,
 the arrival of new social movements
 revolutionary technologies

Question 8

Issue focus on Literature from 1980s, 1990s to 21st century

Answer 8

The issue’s focus on literature from the 1980s, 1990s and twenty-first century also enables the
tracing of both continuities in form, structure and theme and the many new directions that have
characterized various stages of what is now a historical period in its own right. Since the ‘turn to
history’ shows no signs of abating, such a survey also anticipates some of the future directions that
literature might take in its ever-dynamic engagement with history