David Mitchell: Critical Essays (Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays)

The outcome of the first international conference on David Mitchell's writing, this collection of critical essays, focuses on his first three novels - Ghostwritten (1999), number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004) - to provide a sustained analysis of Mitchell's complex narrative techniques and the literary, political and cultural implications of his early work. The essays cover topics ranging from narrative structure, genre and the Bildungsroman to representations of Japan, postmodernism, the construction of identity, utopia, science fiction and postcolonialism.ContentsForewordDavid Mitchell1. Introducing David Mitchell s Universe: A Twenty-First Century House of FictionSarah Dillon2. The Novels in Nine PartsPeter Childs and James Green3. Or something like that : Coming of Age in number9dreamKathryn Simpson4. Remediations of Japan in number9dreamBaryon Tensor Posadas5. The Stories We Tell: Discursive Identity Through Narrative Form in Cloud AtlasCourtney Hopf6. Cloud Atlas: From Postmodernity to the PosthumanHélène Machinal7. Cloud Atlas and If on a winter s night atraveller: Fragmentation and Integrity in the Postmodern NovelWill McMorran8. Strange Transactions : Utopia, Transmigration and Time in Ghostwritten and Cloud AtlasCaroline Edwards9. Speculative Fiction as Postcolonial: Critique in Ghostwritten and Cloud AtlasNicholas Dunlop10. Moonlight bright as a UFO abduction : Science Fiction, Present-Future Alienation and Cognitive MappingWilliam StephensonNotes on ContributorsIndexAbout the EditorSarah Dillon is Lecturer in Contemporary Fiction in the School of English at the University of St Andrews. She is author of The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (2007) and has published essays on Jacques Derrida, Elizabeth Bowen, H.D., Michel Faber, Maggie Gee and David Mitchell.