Downloads: 1
Research Paper | English Language and Literature | Volume 11 Issue 6, June 2022 | Pages: 2075 - 2078 | India
Fiction and the Human Condition: Exploring Identity, Society, and Conflict in Contemporary English Literature
Abstract: Contemporary English literature has become an increasingly vital site for the exploration of identity, social transformation, and conflict in a rapidly globalizing world. This paper examines how contemporary novelists writing in English negotiate questions of selfhood, belonging, and cultural hybridity, while simultaneously offering sustained critique of the social structures- race, class, gender, and nation- that shape individual experience. Drawing on postcolonial theory, trauma studies, and narrative theory, the paper analyzes representative works by authors including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, Khaled Hosseini, and Ian McEwan to demonstrate how contemporary fiction functions simultaneously as aesthetic artifact and as a mode of ethical and political inquiry into the human condition. The analysis is organized around three interrelated thematic axes: identity and hybridity in the context of migration and diaspora; the novel's critical engagement with social structures including class, gender, and cultural belonging; and the representation of conflict, trauma, and historical memory as constitutive of contemporary subjectivity. The paper argues that contemporary English-language fiction, particularly work emerging from postcolonial and diasporic traditions, extends the humanist project of the novel by insisting on the irreducible complexity of individual experience while refusing to abstract that experience from the social and historical conditions that produce it. The paper concludes by considering the implications of this body of literature for broader debates concerning cosmopolitanism, cultural memory, and the ethical function of narrative in contemporary global culture.
Keywords: contemporary literature, identity, postcolonial fiction, trauma narrative, social critique, the novel, hybridity
How to Cite?: Dr. Rehana Abdullah, "Fiction and the Human Condition: Exploring Identity, Society, and Conflict in Contemporary English Literature", Volume 11 Issue 6, June 2022, International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR), Pages: 2075-2078, https://www.ijsr.net/getabstract.php?paperid=SR22626113418, DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21275/SR22626113418