Sam Taylor
Oct05

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Sam Taylor

Posted on Oct 5, 2012 in Research, Talks | 1 comment

I've been developing a new literary methodology for analysing twenty-first century British fictions over the course of the past 5 years, and one of my preoccupations is the way in which time functions in many novels: not only in terms of an increasingly self-relflexive temporal sensibility, but also in terms of structuring generic and aesthetic experimentations. A great example of this can be found in the three published novels by former Guardian musical correspondent Sam Taylor. Arguably the most inventive and exciting writer to engage with temporality in the twenty-first-century, Taylor's debut novel The Republic of Trees (Faber, 2005) offers an astonishing, dystopian vision of adolescent revolutionary idealism that responds to three influential predecessors (which are all also first novels): William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden (1978), and Iain M. Banks’s The Wasp Factory (1984).

It is my argument that there is an increasing concern in British novels of the twenty-first-century with foregrounding temporal experience through disruptive, non-linear and non-contemporaneous narrative frameworks (what I am calling metachronous times). Influenced by an earlier generation of experimental British writers concerned with the powerful critique available to “speculative” fictions – notably Doris Lessing, J. G. Ballard and Muriel Spark – a generation of younger and/or “pre-canonical” novelists are offering new ways of imagining subjectivity and challenging traditional realism by explicitly experimenting with narrative times. Writers like David Mitchell, Jon McGregor, Maggie Gee, John Burnside, Caryl Phillips and Marina Warner are producing innovative engagements with time through their narratives of futurity, apocalypse, transmigration and haunting. A shared preoccupation with rupturing conceptions of linear historical progress brings these novelists together, and their dynamic body of fictions demonstrates the ways in which literary texts can contribute to critical and philosophical theories of historical temporality.
 
This analysis has led to the journal article, "Rethinking the Arcadian Revenge: Metachronous Times in the Fiction of Sam Taylor," which is published in a special issue on "New British Fiction," edited by Professor Patrick O'Donnell in Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 58, Number 3 (Fall 2012).
 
You can download the article through Project Muse.