ABSTRACT
This chapter complements chapter 1 on strategies for studying literature generally and their relevance for contemporary literature. Some of these strategies for dealing with contemporary literature
specifically are best understood with reference to a typical textbook. Judging by the title of Steve Padley’s Key Concepts in Contemporary Literature (2006), it promises to cover roughly the same ground as this book. The first couple of pages, however, outline a different agenda, and in the process exemplify some of the strategies we are interested in here. Padley opens by observing that: ‘The term contemporary denotes an open-ended period, up to and including the present day, but there is a marked lack of consensus about when the period can definitively be said to have begun’ (p. ix). So, more or less arbitrarily, he decides to affix a beginning – he starts with 1945, after the Second World War. In doing this, he takes it for granted that the literature his readers are interested in must be exclusively and originally in English, but he goes a step further by confining himself to British literature alone. By way of explaining this, Padley observes: ‘Ideally, it would be desirable to trace the development of all literatures written in English since 1945, but the resulting volume would either be impossibly long or wholly inadequate in the depth of its coverage’ (p. x). In brief, the academic strategies involved here are:
affixing a period as the contemporary period; limiting the appraisal of the contemporary period to a specific
language and/or territory; and putatively providing adequate and in-depth coverage for the
affixed period and place – which suggests that a survey of representative texts and ideas clarifies what the contemporary in literature is about.
