This volume explores how contemporary fiction responds to global challenges by reshaping genre conventions and narrative forms. The book brings together twelve chapters that examine themes of identity, memory, history, speculative imagination, and survival in works that cross boundaries of form, nation, and discipline. Contributors examine a range of contemporary concerns, offering critical insights into literary innovation in the twenty-first century. Through close readings of a diverse group of canonical and contemporary writers, the collection highlights how hybrid narrative modes enable fiction to address shifting social realities. Drawing from postcolonial, feminist, ecocritical, trauma, spatial, memory, speculative, historical, decolonial, and posthumanist approaches, the chapters explore how genre responds to crisis, transformation, and the demands of contemporary thought. This book will appeal to scholars of English literature, cultural and literary theory, and genre studies, offering both global perspectives and locally grounded analyses of literary form. Its wide range of genres and applied critical frameworks also makes it a valuable resource for teaching and studying contemporary fiction.
