ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on the representation of social relegation. It provides a reading of Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand (2008) along the lines of hospitality considering it as a fictionalisation of the refugee narrative. It goes on to examine Neil Bartlett’s Skin Lane (2007) as a fictional testimony on the ordinary lives of members of submerged sexual minorities in the 1960s. It concludes on an analysis of Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path (2018), an autobiographical account relating the author’s and her husband’s fall into social precarity and exclusion. It is dominated by an interest in the ethics and politics of attention as a capacity that has to be built up for readers to see what the dominant frames of perception exclude from consideration.
