The dissertation focuses on the contemporary British fiction discussing books that in a certain way reflect the changing perception of history and the relationship between historiography and fiction. Several thematic aspects of this reflection are examined, namely, attitudes towards the Victorian era, city, country, archive (relation between fictional narrative and historical sources - meta-textuality) and history as a "palimpsest", i.e., as a set of multiple, mutually permeable layers of text. The changing attitude to the past, which finally leads to doubts on strict division between historiography and literary fiction, is mostly discussed in books published mainly in the last thirty years, the only exception being John Fowlesʼs The French Lieutenantʼs Woman which the author of the dissertation perceives as a book of major importance for the subsequent re-evaluation of the attitude to history. Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd, Alan Moore (London), Michel Faber (the Victorians), Graham Swift, Bruce Chatwin and Adam Thorpe (country), Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith (novel and history), A.S. Byatt and Julian Barnes (archive, literary heritage) are also discussed. " For the authors of historical fiction, history is, above all, a rich source of stories. These stories are told and retold, they are rediscovered and adapted for...

This dissertation investigates representations of betrayal in works by Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Irvine Welsh, and Alan Hollinghurst. In rethinking "bad" acts of betrayal as embodying an ethical desire not for the good but for "the better," this dissertation challenges the simplistic good/bad binary as mandated by neo-imperialist, late capitalist, and heteronormative society. In doing so, my project intervenes in the current paradigm of ethical literary criticism, whose focus on the canon and the universal Good gained from it runs a risk of underwriting moral majoritarianism and judgmentalism. I argue that some contemporary narratives of betrayal open up onto a new ethic, insofar as they reveal the unethical totalization assumed in ethical literary criticism's pursuit of the normative Good. The first full chapter analyzes how Kureishi's Intimacy portrays an ethical adultery as it breaks away from the tenacious authority of monogamy in portraying adult intimacy in literature, what I call the narrative of "coupledom." Instead, Intimacy imagines a new narrative of "singledom" unconstrained by the marriage/adultery dyad. In the next chapter on Fury, a novel about Manhattan's celebrity culture, I interrogate the current discourse of cosmopolitanism and propose that Rushdie's novel exposes how both cosmopolitanism and nationalism are turned into political commodities by mediafrenzied and celebrity-obsessed metropolitan cultural politics. In a world where an ethical choice between cosmopolitanism and nationalism is impossible to make, Fury achieves an ethical act of treason against both. The next chapter scrutinizes Mark Renton's "ripping off" of his best mates and his critique of capitalism in Trainspotting and Porno. If Renton betrays his friends in order to leave the plan(e) of capitalism in the original novel, he satirizes the trustworthiness of trust in Porno by crushing his best mate's blind trust in business "ethics" and by ripping him off again. The last full chapter updates the link between aesthetics and ethics in post-AIDS contexts in Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. In portraying without judgment beautiful, dark-skinned, dying homosexual bodies, Hollinghurst's novel "fleshes out" the traditional sphere of aesthetics that denies the low and impure pleasures frequently paired with gay sex.

This dissertation examines the trope of filiation in novels by three contemporary British writers: John Banville, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. The trope of filiation and the related theme of inheritance has long been central to the concerns of the British novel, but it took on a new significance in the twentieth century, as the novel responded both thematically and formally to the aftermath of the two world wars. This study demonstrates the ways in which Banville, McEwan, and Ishiguro each situate their work in relation to this legacy, by means of an analogy between the inheritance structures figured within their novels and the inheritance performed by their engagement with the genre itself. This study relies on an instructive analogy to similar treatments of the larger problem of cultural filiation by the theorists Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Levinas exposes in his work the ethical and political problems of modernist temporality by critiquing modernity’s rejection of filiation, a rejection modeled also in the lost children, and barren and celibate men and women of modernist novels. Derrida meanwhile provides a way forward with his representation and performance of inheritance as a critical and transformative act, which is characterised on one hand by an ethical injunction, and on the other, by a filtering or a differentiation which changes the tradition even as it reaffirms it.

This dissertation examines the trope of filiation in novels by three contemporary British writers: John Banville, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. The trope of filiation and the related theme of inheritance has long been central to the concerns of the British novel, but it took on a new significance in the twentieth century, as the novel responded both thematically and formally to the aftermath of the two world wars. This study demonstrates the ways in which Banville, McEwan, and Ishiguro each situate their work in relation to this legacy, by means of an analogy between the inheritance structures figured within their novels and the inheritance performed by their engagement with the genre itself. This study relies on an instructive analogy to similar treatments of the larger problem of cultural filiation by the theorists Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Levinas exposes in his work the ethical and political problems of modernist temporality by critiquing modernity’s rejection of filiation, a rejection modeled also in the lost children, and barren and celibate men and women of modernist novels. Derrida meanwhile provides a way forward with his representation and performance of inheritance as a critical and transformative act, which is characterised on one hand by an ethical injunction, and on the other, by a filtering or a differentiation which changes the tradition even as it reaffirms it.