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Nick Bentley provides an introduction to the major novelists and the main themes in narrative fiction over the last 35 years. He offers a critical discussion of important debates in contemporary fiction engaging with concepts such as postmodernism; the impact of feminism and gender in literary studies; the rise of postcolonial literary theory; and the place of fiction within broader debates in contemporary culture. Bentley offers thought-provoking analysis of a range of British writers including Martin Amis, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Ian McEwan, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith and Jeanette Winterson.

This article argues that trauma is at the heart of Caryl Phillips's fiction with particular reference to two novels, Crossing the River (1993) and A Distant Shore (2003). It assesses a number of writers associated with trauma theory and takes issue with the prevailing idea that trauma studies do not sit well with postcolonial literary practice. Close readings of the two novels reveal how their focus on trauma allows Phillips to articulate narratives that reveal postand neo-colonial contexts.

[...]the term becomes shorthand for any identification of teenage, or adolescent delinquency.13 As Stanley Cohen argues, the Teddy boys 'were perceptually merged into a day-to-day delinquency problem'.14 Although this is the dominant image of Teddy boys circulating in the 1950s, there were a few contrasting representations in the popular press. According to the tales Ed told me, when he left his jungle occasionally and crossed the frontier into civilized sections of the city and had a coffee with me, he lived the high old life, brave, bold and splendid, smashing crockery in all-night cafes and crowning distinguished colleagues with tyre levers in cul-de-sacs and parking lots, and even appearing in a telly programme on the Ted question where he stared photogenically, and only grunted.32 This passage identifies a number of characteristics that are common to the representation of Teddy boy subculture generally in the 1950s. [...]in the context of the 1950s it provides further 'evidence' of what would be perceived as the very real delinquency of this group. [...]Trevor Lomas, the Teddy boy figure in Spark's novel, is representative of the prevailing dominant culture rather than a potentially subversive threat to it.