The Edinburgh Companion to the Millennial Novel

Lloyd, Christopher
Bourdeau, Loïc (ed.)

The ‘millennial novel’ is a term and genre that is at once over-debated and under-examined. As the first major book to survey and map out the millennial novel across multiple countries, this Companion offers a global framework for thinking about the dominant forms and preoccupations of writing by millennial authors. Scholars of contemporary literature will benefit from its breadth of investigation – across issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, family, social structures, nationhood and literary form – as well as its detailed studies of particular novels and authors, including Brit Bennett, Ocean Vuong, Ottessa Moshfegh, Sally Rooney, Raven Leilani and Ling Ma. Overall, The Edinburgh Companion to the Millennial Novel shows that millennial fiction is neither homogeneous nor impervious to previous socio-literary movements. In turn, it complicates our understanding of the genre, attempts to define the contours of contemporary literary production and reflects on twenty-first-century sociality.