Rachel Cusk: Contemporary Critical Perspectives

Rachel Cusk is one of the most critically acclaimed and controversial contemporary British authors. Her diverse body of work offers a striking portrait of trends in 21st-century literature, and the history of Cusk’s literary output is one of experimentation and a desire to push against established cultural models.

Rachel Cusk: Contemporary Critical Perspectives is the first critical guide to Cusk’s work, spanning novels including Saving Agnes, A Country Life, and Second Place, her ’autofictional’ Outline trilogy, and her nonfiction A Life’s Work, The Last Supper, Aftermath and the Coventry essays. Rigorous and wide-ranging, this book provides an accessible and lucid introduction to Cusk’s work, exploring themes of gender relations, class dynamics, maternal identity and creative freedom. The collection concludes with an in-depth interview with Cusk, conducted by Merve Emre, reflecting on her influences, writing and experiences.

Mapping the formal and stylistic shift across her career and locating them within their specific contexts, this collection provides a crucial analysis of Cusk’s influences, politics, and literary techniques that speak to many of the most pressing issues in contemporary literature.

Roberta Garrett is Senior lecturer on the Creative Writing programme and the Media Foundation programme in the Department of Arts and Cultural Industries at the University of East London, UK. She has published widely on representations of gender, class and race in popular literature and film. She is the author of Postmodern Chick-Flicks: the Return of the Woman’s Film (2008) and Writing the Modern Family: Contemporary Literature, Motherhood and Neoliberal Culture (2021) and co-editor of We Need to Talk About Family: Essays on Neoliberalism, the Family and Popular Culture (2016).

Liam Harrison is Associate Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, UK, and a founding editor of the literary journal Tolka. He is a graduate representative for the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies, and a managing editor of the academic journal Alluvium. He is also a co-founder of the Contemporary Irish Literature Research Network.