This book is the first full-length study of Douglas Coupland, one of the twenty-first century’s most innovative and influential novelists. The study explores the prolific first decade and a half of Coupland’s career, from Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) to JPod (2006), a period in which he published ten novels and four significant volumes of non-fiction.
Emerging in the last decade of the twentieth century – amidst the absurd contradictions of instantaneous global communication and acute poverty – Coupland’s novels, short stories, essays and visual art have intervened in specifically contemporary debates regarding authenticity, artifice and art. This book explores Coupland’s response, in ground-breaking novels such as Microserfs, Girlfriend in a Coma and Miss Wyoming, to some of the most pressing issues of our times.
Designed for students, researchers and general readers alike, the study is structured around thematically focused chapters that consider Coupland’s engagement with narrative, consumer culture, space, religion and ideas of the future.
Table of Content
1. Introduction: Coupland’s contexts
2. ‘Denarration’ or Getting a Life: Coupland and narrative
3. ‘I am not a Target Market’: Coupland consumption and junk culture
4. Nowhere, anywhere, somewhere: Coupland and space
5. ‘You are the first generation raised without religion’: Coupland and postmodern spirituality
6. Conclusion: JPod and the future
About the author
Andrew Tate is Lecturer in English at Lancaster University
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