Since his astonishing Academy Award-nominated film, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Hanif Kureishi has been recognized as a major writer who has both documented and profoundly influenced contemporary British culture. His first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), remains a key work in redefining our sense of what it means to be English in the postcolonial era.
Hanif Kureishi: Contemporary Critical Perspectives brings together leading scholars of contemporary British fiction and culture to reassess the full range of the author's writings, from novels such as The Black Album, My Son the Fanatic and Something to Tell You to films such as Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, My Son the Fanatic and Venus. As well as exploring Kureishi's handling of such themes as Thatcherism, terrorism, race, class and sexuality, the book move moves beyond sociological and psychoanalytical approaches, examining the stylistic features of his most recent novel, The Last Word. The volume includes interviews with Stephen Frears, the director of My Beautiful Launderette, and with Hanif Kureishi himself, as well as a foreword by Roger Michell, who has directed several of the author's screenplays, most recently Le Week-End.
Susan Alice Fischer is Professor of English at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York, USA. She is Editor of the Literary London journal.
Foreword (Roger Michell, Director of The Buddha of Suburbia (BBC, 1993))
Biographical Timeline
Introduction (Susan Alice Fischer, Medgar Evers College, City University of New York, USA)
1.I Believe My Eyes: The Transformative Cinema of Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Launderette (Deanna Kamiel, New School, USA)
2.Culture and Anarchy in Thatcher's London: Hanif Kureishi's Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (Peter Hitchcock, Baruch College and Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA)
3.The Suburbs That Did It: Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia, The Black Album and Metropolitan Multicultural Fiction (Ryan Trimm, University of Rhode Island, USA)
4.'A Better Philosophy': Hanif Kureishi's My Son the Fanatic (Susan Alice Fischer, Medgar Evers College, City University of New York, USA)
5.The Engima of Abandonment: Re-Thinking Hanif Kureishi's Importance for Multiculturalism (Michael Perfect, University of Cambridge, UK)
6.Hanif Kureishi's Essays (Dave Gunning, University of Birmingham, UK)
7.The Parallax of Ageing: Hanif Kureishi's The Body (Jago Morrison, Brunel University, UK)
8.The Other Kureishi: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Something to Tell You (Geoff Boucher, Deakin University, Australia)
9.The Last Word on Hanif Kureishi 'A Very Serious Business': Hanif Kureishi in Conversation (Susan Alice Fischer, Medgar Evers College, City University of New York, USA)
An 'Extraordinary Encounter': Stephen Frears in Conversation (Susan Alice Fischer, Medgar Evers College, City University of New York, USA)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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