End of the Line
The unpublished novels of Anita Mason
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31273/eirj.v10i1.846Keywords:
Anita Mason, contemporary fiction, British fiction, dystopian novel, ecological fiction, political novelAbstract
Anita Mason was a Booker Prize-nominated novelist who taught Creative Writing at the University of Warwick from 2007 until 2009. At the time of her death in September 2020, she left behind three unpublished short novels that provide a powerful, if disturbing, coda to the main body of her work. The novels are typical of Mason in that their settings are diverse: Chuichui is set in Haiti; Suppose in contemporary Israel; and Andromeda in a dystopian south-west England. Thematically, their concerns are contemporary and seem equally varied: political violence and corruption in Chuichui; the falsifying of history and culture in Suppose; and the consequences of the abuse of the natural world in Andromeda. This article contends, however, that beyond this diversity these works share deeper concerns that indicate a darker authorial outlook than that suggested by Mason’s published work, and that amount to a crisis of faith in artistic representation and even in human civilisation itself.
Downloads
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 Colin Hutchinson
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY), which permits use and redistribution of the work provided that the original author and source are credited, a link to the license is included, and an indication of changes which were made. Third-party users may not apply legal terms or technological measures to the published article which legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
If accepted for publication authors’ work will be made open access and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license unless previously agreed with Exchanges’ Editor-in-Chief prior to submission.
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. (see: The Effect of Open Access)
