What Is Contemporary Fiction?
Contemporary fiction can be defined as literature written by authors who refuse to reside within literary boundaries, choosing to reflect the realities, insanities, absurdities, ironies, comedies and contradictions present in post-globalization human cultures. It is a flexible term that does not set any boundaries, encouraging expanding them instead. Contemporary fiction authors uses any technique available to express themselves.
Contemporary fiction is not a genuine literary movement. It’s best characterized as the current state or model of written and filmed fiction that has developed over time since the end of World War II and is in a constant state of change and contradiction. Contemporary literature evolves as a response to authors and their environments and has no genre limitations. It has no definitive start date but has roots in previous literary and cultural modes of thought and expression.
World War I and the notion that there was no objective truth or morality lead writers to question the rest of reality in their works, inventing unreliable narrators and creating entirely new methods of writing, such as stream of consciousness.
As of 2014, current contemporary fiction is not limited by objective truths, convention, morality or ideology. Instead, authors often choose to highlight such areas and modern culture’s disillusion through irony, cynicism, meta-fiction, nostalgia or subjectivity. Contemporary fictions may have a real-world setting or revolve around real-world events in history.
