Among the large body of contemporary British novels dealing with the past, one specific genre can be identified, and called, the "novel of recollections" as it revolves around its first person narrator's coming to terms with the often traumatic memories of his or her past life. This article focuses on this genre and its characteristic features, both formal and concerning the content, in John Banville's The Sea (2005), Anne Enright's The Gathering (2007) and Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending (2011). Using the example of Graham Swift's Tomorrow (2007), this article also shows that these features alone may not necessarily guarantee the text's positive reception, suggests the main reasons why Swift's novel failed with most readers and critics, and contemplates the novel of recollections' future course and development.

Jim Crace likes to refer to himself as a “landscape writer” and indeed, in each of his eleven novels he has created a distinct yet recognizable imaginary landscape or cityscape. This has led critics to coin the term “Craceland” to describe the idiosyncratic milieux he creates, which, through his remarkably authentic and poetic rendering of geography and topography, appear to be both other and familiar at the same time. In The Pesthouse 2007, the milieu is the devastated America of an imagined future, a country which has deteriorated into a pre-modern and pre-industrial wasteland so hostile to sustainable existence that most of its inhabitants have become refugees travelling eastwards to sail to a new life on another continent. Franklin and Margaret, two such refugees, are leaving their homes not only to flee misery and destitution, but also the trauma and pain occasioned by the loss of their relatives. Using geocriticism as a practice and theoretical point of departure, this article presents and analyses the various ways in which Crace’s novel renders and explores its spaces, landscapes and places, as well as how it links them with the transformation of the protagonists’ psyches and mental worlds.

Petr Chalupský CRIME NARRATIVES IN PETER ACKROYD'S HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTIONSThis article focuses on the various forms of crime narratives found in selected works of Peter Ackroyd which are concerned with the city of London. Its aim is to show their function in the context of the author's narrative strategy and thematic composition, specifically discursive pluralization, intertextuality and the conception of the city as a text. It also shows how the subversion of these narrative principles induces the hybridization and consequent invigoration of the historical novel genre. In order to illustrate the ways in which Ackroyd incorporates elements of crime narratives in both his fiction and non-fiction works this essay focuses on: Hawksmoor (

In each of his twelve novels, Jim Crace, who likes to refer to himself as a "landscape writer", created a distinct yet recognisable imaginary landscape or cityscape, which led critics to coin the term "Craceland" to denote this idiosyncratic milieu. Through Craceʼs remarkable ability to both authentically and poetically render these milieux, they appear other and familiar at the same time. Moreover, he occupies these places and spaces with communities in transition, which include people who are caught on the verge of a historical shift that necessitates certain social, economic, political and cultural changes that affect all spheres of their private and public lives. Consequently, they shatter essential aspects of their identities. A crucial role in this process is assumed by the locations through which these individuals move or reside, either permanently or temporarily. Crace's debut novel, Continent (1986), comprises seven thematically linked stories that are variations of a fictitious realm, an imaginary seventh continent whose inhabitants are going through an identitarian crisis which is, symptomatically for Crace, reflected in their spatial experience. The aim of this paper is to provide a geocritical analysis of the novel and explore how it dramatises the intricate interaction between the geographic and topographic properties of landscapes and the protagonists' psyches.

Hanif Kureishi's works contain numerous autobiographical features and are peopled with characters that often bear a striking similarity not only to the author himself but also to his relatives and ex-partners. Intimacy (1998) is conceived as the dramatic confessional monologue of a middle-aged man about to leave his partner and two children to live with a younger woman, an experience the author himself had not long before its publication. This article deals with the novella in the broader context of the author's late 1990s texts in order to distinguish between autobiographic narrative and writing from experience, showing that the latter rather than the former is employed in these works. Supported by Kureishi's defence of the book as a literary game it also argues that rather than providing a hateful perspective on femininity the novella offers a variation on one of the author's idiosyncrasies -a hopeful belief in love and humanity. The article further attempts to explore the possibilities and limitations of the genre of confessional narrative as exemplified in Intimacy.