Academic literature on the topic 'John Lanchester'

This paper examines how contemporary works of fiction and nonfiction reflect on anticipated cases of climate dislocation. Building on existing research about migrant agency, climate fiction, and human rights, it traces the contours of climate migration discourse before analyzing how three twenty-first-century novels enable us to reimagine the “great displacement” beyond simplistic militarized and humanitarian frames. Zooming in on stories by Mohsin Hamid, John Lanchester, and Margaret Drabble that envision hypothetical calamities while responding to present-day refugee “crises”, this paper explains how these texts interrogate apocalyptic narratives by demilitarizing borderscapes, exploring survivalist mindsets, and interrogating shallow appeals to empathy.

Literary writings have broadened that the world broaches the religious and cultural discrimination between the imperialist countries and the colonized immigrants. John Lanchester spreads over the conflicts of the multi-religious culture of migrants and the pride of the Christmas festival in European countries in his novel, Capital (2012). The Christian countries have defeated the migrants by showing pretentious prevailing city life in London. Unfortunately, some migrating laborers are illiterate to encounter them all. He forces migrants not to convert themselves from one religion to another for getting jobs. He also emancipates his presser to look after the life of migrating people in European countries. He then indirectly talks about the three religions: Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. He proves that London is a place for Christianity, which is reflected in Christmas decorations. This novel elongates many themes related to the social and economic exploitation of poor migrants at Pepys Road in London.

Immigrants from colonised countries live in many European countries, including Portugal, England, Germany and France. The prime reason for their immigration is to make money. Many post-colonial novels reflect the terrible condition of the immigrants in the world. In general, they highlight the ruin of multi-culturalism, morality and kindness in the prevailing society. The European countries focus on the fundamental needs and their expectations. They fail to protect the young immigrants and their aims. John Lanchester’s Capital boastfully describes the impact of the inevitable immigration of Asians and Africans to London. It is observed from the study that some immigrants are attracted by the life of aristocratic Londoners. This influences them to involve in criminal and immoral activities to live a luxurious life. As a result, London becomes a place of immorality. The dreams and cultures of the immigrants are entirely dissolute. On the one hand, the immigrants are considered to be slaves and criminals and on the other hand, they are exploited in sports, education and business contexts. This article brings out the condition of the immigrants in Europe with special reference to John Lanchester’s Capital through a qualitative study.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientistsʼ Doomsday Clock, first introduced in 1947, recently movedthe fictional clock forward; it now rests at 100 seconds to midnight, or 100 seconds from destroying our selves. The numerous threats posed by nuclear weapons, pandemics, weaponized technology, and catastrophic climate change create an ʻenvironment of miseryʼ in which all action—and all inaction—is fraught with risk. Two recent novels employ dystopian visions of the United States and Britain, respectively, and explore the consequences of social engineering that takes place to minimize (perceived) risks and increase safety. Dalcherʼs Vox (2018) and Lanchesterʼs The Wall (2019) are two novels that are a commentary on a world in which risk is pervasive and in which (in)action can exacerbate dire circumstances. At the same time, the novels highlight that local (national) action is doomed to fail if it does not also consider the global interconnectedness of challenges and risks.

Abstract This essay explores how John Lanchester’s Capital adapts classical realism to represent the contemporary global city; it pays particular attention to how London’s position in the world-system disrupts Lukácsian totality. Because the novel attends to the complexity and extensiveness of the world-system, it depicts the city not as a representative totality but as embedded in the global circuits of capital, shaped by the influences of inward migration and global finance. In this the novel has affinities with many fictions of the global periphery, for instance portraying the city as at once socially fragmented and structurally connected. Furthermore, the novel departs from classical realism in its closure; though the 2008 financial crisis is omitted from the novel, it overshadows the entire plot, and its absence emphasizes the lack of finality in the story of this phase of capitalism itself. In demonstrating the temporal and spatial unknowability of contemporary capital, Lanchester’s novel both affirms the capacity of realism to trace deep systemic connections and reveals the fragility of its construction of a social totality, positing a realism attendant to its own perspectival limits within the world-system.

ABSTRACT The city has always played a pivotal role in human history because, as Henry Lefebvre reminds us, the physical structure of the urban place is not just a neutral container of social and historical events, but it acts as a sort of dialogic dimension based on symbols, sets of values, and customs, in which people can give order to their reality, anchoring their identity in a sort of collective memory, and in a network of reciprocal human bonds: a community. Despite the vast theoretical background and narrative tradition, the enormous changes that the urban dimension underwent over the last century have brought new challenges and the necessity for new theorizations to the fore. This dissertation aims to offer a glimpse of such a complex contemporary challenge, particularly narrowing the focus on the relationship between the city and the post-multicultural society, taking into consideration the particular case of London. The choice to focus the research on London is based on the fact that the English capital provides a unique example of a post-multicultural city. The study specifically looks into how the concrete local dimension of the city interacts with the complexity of a transcultural and transnational society, whose heterogeneity exponentially increased in the last century, imposing a pervasive condition of superdiversity, as Steven Vertovec defined it. Given this peculiar condition, the study endeavours to investigate, on one hand, how the idea of citizenship and community changes together with the question of "who is the alien?", and, on the other hand, how urban narrations influence the way people live and perceive such changes. The research method employed is based on an interdisciplinary approach, which aims to combine a historical overview with the philosophical and scientific perspective of urban studies, and the sociological points of view of post-multicultural studies. Theoretical evidence provided by the different disciplines is integrated into the literary analysis of three contemporary narrative works. The first chapter outlines the concept of city from an etymological, historical, philosophical and literary point of view. This overview explores several aspects: why belonging to the same city gave people a particular identity, with particular symbols and customs; and finally, how the idea of city has changed together with its conformation, function, and rhythm as a unique organic system, following the evolution of historical and human changes. The second chapter deals with contemporary post-migration societies, specifically that of London, looking into the most important processes and theoretical reconfigurations at stake such as the idea of citizenship, integration, Britishness and identity. The third chapter will open the literary analysis of this dissertation by presenting Kamal Ahmed’s work The Life and Times of a Very British Man. The Anglo-Sudanese British journalist Kamal Ahmed sheds light not only on the present condition of contemporary post-multicultural London, but also investigates the facts and narrations that modern London is rooted in. In the fourth chapter the focus will shift to post-multicultural London seen as a gigantic economic machine, through the analysis of John Lanchester’s novel Capital. The aim is to describe how the increasing commodification of the city has influenced the idea of community and citizenship, profoundly characterised by obliviousness and disconnectedness. The fifth chapter will discuss these questions by narrowing the focus on how the commodified society influence people's perception of the self and the city, leading to a progressive alienation of its inhabitants. Tibor Fischer's Voyage to the End of the Room particularly problematises the idea of the ‘alien,’ by dealing with the problem of self-alienation, which seems increasingly to affect a large part of urban inhabitants.