We can review the corpus of many contemporary transgressive novelists in light of their continued engagements with transgression and genre.
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Many novelists, such as Jonny Glynn, Mark Manning and Bill Drummond and Iain Banks, employ the generic modes of popular fiction and techniques associated with literary fiction throughout their work to enter into a dialogue with contemporary culture as a whole, by exploring how its fringes can be connected to its centres. It must, in other words, challenge social standards and norms (McCracken 1998: 158). It argues that the popular text is successful because it operates at the borders of what is socially acceptable and, in order to provoke a widespread interest, the text must, at some level, breach the bounds of that acceptability. draws attention to popular culture’s role in struggles over meaning. There is an argument throughout for the use of language as one element of the oppositional and transgressive force:Ī theory of transgression. The appropriation of language in these novels is thus important in terms of identity formation. The importance of the vernacular can be seen in such notorious novels as James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late (1994), Irvine Welsh’s Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995) and Niall Griffiths’ Grits (2000), where the narrative is filled with colloquialisms and obscenities that are used to attack dominant power structures.Ĭontemporary transgressive novels
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Additionally, this criticism overlooks the potential for different forms of subversion, parody and carnival which contravene the conventions of genre fiction language, particularly the use of the vernacular, is one such method for introducing instability. Lynnette Hunter surveys different arguments concerning the many definitions for “literature” and identifies one characteristic which is particularly pertinent to contemporary fiction: ‘it uses language in a way that is different from the familiar hence “popular” writing is not literature because it plays towards convention often because the writer needs to make money’ (Hunter 2001: 13).
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One of the overt criticisms directed towards popular fiction is its requirement for a formulaic structure of characters, plot and narrative, which risks perpetuating the stereotype that all such fiction is repetitious, mass-produced and lacking in depth and originality.