Edinburgh Companion to the Millennial Novel

The 'millennial novel' is a term and genre that is at once over-debated and under-examined. As the first major book to survey and map out the millennial novel across multiple countries, this Companion offers a global framework for thinking about the dominant forms and preoccupations of writing by millennial authors. Scholars of contemporary literature will benefit from its breadth of investigation across issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, family, social structures, nationhood and literary form as well as its detailed studies of particular novels and authors, including Brit Bennett, Ocean Vuong, Ottessa Moshfegh, Sally Rooney, Raven Leilani and Ling Ma. Overall, The Edinburgh Companion to the Millennial Novel shows that millennial fiction is neither homogeneous nor impervious to previous socio-literary movements. In turn, it complicates our understanding of the genre, attempts to define the contours of contemporary literary production and reflects on twenty-first-century sociality.

Loïc Bourdeau is a scholar of French Studies and the Medical Humanities in the School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Maynooth University, formerly Louisiana Board of Regents Associate Professor of Francophone Studies at UL Lafayette. He has published extensively on contemporary cultural productions by marginalised voices in France and Québec. In addition to several chapters and articles, he has edited or co-edited four volumes, including Horrible Mothers. Representations across Francophone North America (2019), ReFocus: The Films of François Ozon (2021), and Revisiting HIV/AIDS in French Culture: Raw Matters (2022). He has edited special issues of the Australian Journal of French Studies (2020), Nouvelles Études Francophones (2022), and a special issue of Nottingham French Studies on ‘The Twenty-first Century Social Novel in French’ (2024). Christopher Lloyd is Associate Professor of Learning and Teaching at the University of Hertfordshire. He is the author of the monographs Corporeal Legacies in the US South: Memory and Embodiment in Contemporary Culture (Palgrave, 2018) and Rooting Memory, Rooting Place: Regionalism in the Twenty-First-Century American South (Palgrave, 2015) as well as the co-edited collection The Affects of Pedagogy in Literary Studies (Routledge, 2023) with Hilary Emmett. Christopher is also the author of the poetry pamphlet Pick Up Your Feelings (2024) and the forthcoming monograph A Queer Bestiary: Non/Humans in Contemporary US Literature. Christopher is the co-editor of the European Journal of American Culture, the Vice-Chair of the British Association of American Studies, and the producer/editor of the Diversifying and Decolonising the University podcast.