商品詳細

This book explores how contemporary Iraqi fiction has been violently shaped by the strange, shifting and often paradoxical market logics of neoliberalism that defined the 2003 Iraq War. Through the framework of ‘creative destruction', it theorises how this conflict galvanised new modes of literary experimentation among key contemporary Iraqi authors. Across five chapters, Annie Webster maps an irrealist turn across post-2003 novels, short stories and anthologies which reckon with the pervasive environmental, archival, human, heritage and infrastructural consequences of neoliberal violence in Iraq. This study illuminates how contemporary Iraqi fiction has been incorporated into an international literary marketplace that often reinforces (and even celebrates) the logic that from moments of destruction and crisis comes creative innovation. It shows how authors are increasingly confronting these market logics in their writing through subversive generic experiments, irreverent modes of intertextuality, provocative metafictional manoeuvres and absurd dark humour.