The New Family Saga: Arundhati Roy's, Amy Tan's and Kate Atkinson's Fiction

From Table of Contents:

• Identity and Family - The Impact of Space and Time on The New Family Saga
• How to Tell a Story: Narrative Dominions and Dominos
• Language and Communication
• Wide Appeal and Translatability

The central hypothesis of the volume is that a new kind of saga has established itself as a trend in contemporary English-language literature. As the cultural paradigm has shifted, authors have reverted to the desire to create a story with a sense of an ending. These narratives, for which the paper suggest the term "new family sagas", bring about a cathartic experience and rediscover the familial and historical past. One of the key points is the appeal represented by family sagas as a link between past, present, and future. The universality of the themes presented and the renewed interest in their stakes makes them widely translatable and already accessible in several languages. Amy Tan, Kate Atkinson, and Arundhati Roy are representative of this new type of fiction, as they pioneered and helped popularize the genre.

According to the author of the analysis, these works of fiction are characterized textually by a lack of a linear and chronological narrative, by fragmentation and a puzzle-like narrative, and by a playful use of intertextuality. Thematically, they are distinguished by a focus on feminine points of view and on underrepresented categories, on the private sphere as a reflection of the public, on preserving cultural identity, and on overcoming traumatic events through experience-sharing.

The paper uses a text in context multidimensional approach, where the text takes precedence. It relies on critical approaches and concepts pertaining to narratology, space studies, postmodernism, cultural identity and memory (with a focus on feminine perception), pragmatics, and translation studies.