Jim Crace
Having worked on Jim Crace's fiction as part of my PhD research, Fictions of the Not Yet: Time in the 21st Century British Novel, I was keen to meet the critically-acclaimed novelist and Jim kindly agreed to let me interview him at his house in Birmingham. Between numerous cups of tea I also had the rare and unusual chance to discuss my own literary analysis of his novels – I had emailed him a copy of my article "Microtopias: The Post-Apoalyptic Communities of Jim Crace's The Pesthouse," which was published in the British journal Textual Practice in 2009, and was surprised Jim had read the article! The article positions The Pesthouse as part of a broader contemporary shift towards the scaling down of utopian imaginaries and argues that the utopian communities in Crace's distant post-apocalyptic American future function as critical, micro-political alternatives; what I call literary microtopias.
Philip Tew has published an excellent monograph on Crace's fiction with Manchester University Press, as well as a chapter in an edited collection with David James on New Versions of Pastoral, but to my mind Crace remains sadly under-studied in contemporary criticism.
The transcripts of my interview with Jim are still being edited and I hope to submit them for publication after another interview. Crace has confirmed that his next novel, Archipelago, will be his last work of published fiction and I look forward to catching up with him after it has been released.
You can preview a green open access post-print version of my article below, or click here to download the pdf.
Dr Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research and teaching specialisms are in 21st century literature and critical theory, science fiction and post-apocalyptic narratives, Marxist aesthetics, and utopianism.
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