交融中的创新:21世纪英国小说创作论

Innovation through Intersection: Approaching 21st-Century British Fiction

历经现代主义、后现代主义两大文学浪潮以及多种文学批评理论的洗礼,英国小说在迈入21世纪后非但没有死,反而涌现出更加旺盛的发展势头,展示出令人振奋的盎然生机。萨尔曼·拉什迪、伊恩·麦克尤恩、朱利安·巴恩斯等一大批文坛老将笔耕不辍、频推新作,引发批评热潮;与此同时,扎迪·史密斯、汤姆·麦卡锡、亚当·瑟尔威尔等众多文坛新锐锋芒毕现,势头猛进,令人侧目。本文试图以若干当代英国主要小说家及其代表作品为例,从"叙事形式"和"创作主题"的双重层面考察英国小说在21世纪的发展。21世纪英国小说家们批判性地继承英国文学固有的现实主义传统,同时又充分吸纳现代主义、后现代主义的创新精神,不仅在叙事形式上消解了现实主义与实验主义、虚构与非虚构、时间艺术与空间艺术、历史小说与侦探小说等诸多艺术样式之间的虚假对立,而且在创作主题上实现了科技与人文、伦理与审美、历史与现实、宗教与世俗、区域化与全球化等众多命题之间的交融和暗合,有力地拓展了当代英国小说的创作视野。在此基础上,文章进一步讨论了21世纪英国小说的启发价值和阐释挑战,以期为学界的深入研究提供建设性参考。

Having weathered literary movements such as modemism and post- modemism, and survived the scrutiny of various critical theories, British fiction did not meet its end but flourished in the first decade of the 21st century. Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, among other veteran writers, continue to draw critical attention by producing one masterpiece after another, while younger novelists such as Zadie Smith, Adam Thirlwell, and Tom McCarthy play an increasingly important role in the contemporary British literary scene. This article argues that the 21st-century British novels feature boundary-crossing in both narrative forms and thematic concerns. On the one hand, they tend to disrupt the false opposition between realism and experimentalism, fiction and non-fiction, temporal art and spatial art, historical fiction and detective fiction; on the other hand, they often intersect science with culture, ethics with aesthetics, history with reality, localization with globalization, and religion with secularity. The article also discusses the consequent interpretive challenges, and offers some tentative suggestions for future studies in 21 st-century British fiction.