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This article attends to recent examples of British estate literature, a literary form which extends across disparate genres and media. In general, estate literature attempts to correct pernicious prejudices about communities centred on the council estate, stereotypes which align classist, racist, and sexist rhetoric to marginalise this population. In addition to locating recent examples of estate literature – Caleb Femi's, Poor (2020), Anders Lustgarten's The Seven Acts of Mercy (2016), and Guy Gunaratne's In Our Mad and Furious City (2018) – amidst this socio-economic context, this paper also identifies the various formal features these works draw upon to generate a collective voice which at once rejects the othering of the council estate while also resisting the temptation to substitute one reductive group identity label for another. In these texts, often-surprising connections are formed on the grounds of the estate between people, objects, ideas, art, music – and fade as suddenly as they appear. The essay spans media studies, literary criticism, and sociology to argue that the networks conjured by estate literature are not only corrective but generative, inasmuch as they indicate that more affirmative configurations of these networks are possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Goretti Kyomuhendo's Waiting: A Novel of Uganda at War exposes some of the conceptual problems of contemporary human rights discourse. Joseph Slaughter proposes that the Bildungsroman and human rights norms are interdependent, mutually reinforcing, and share underlying assumptions about the relationship between individuals and society. However, if human rights discourse and the Bildungsroman are analogous, this article suggests that Kyomuhendo's experiments with the form of the Bildungsroman offer a critique of human rights discourse which is more radical than the ambivalent examples Slaughter considers. The article examines the insistent use of familial imagery, and in particular images of blood and birth, in Waiting, and argues that the repeated use of such language is in tension with the conventional logic of the Bildungsroman, in which the plot tends to depend on the movement away from the familial sphere. This tension recalls, in literary terms, a contradiction in conceptualizations of the democratic nation-state which Jacques Derrida explored through analysis of the term 'fraternity', and thus indicates the limitations of a version of human rights discourse which centres the nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues thatThe Pale Kingexplores the relationship between feelings and political views. There are some sections of the novel in which characters make seemingly straightforward arguments about the political importance of values and attitudes like discipline, civic duty rather than duty to self, adultness and self-possession. However, this article traces the ways in which these ideas and phrases recur acrossThe Pale King,the unexpected contexts in which they reappear and the transformations in meaning they consequently undergo. In this way, it shows that, for the book's characters, emotional, subjective life significantly contributes to—but also repeatedly unbalances and undermines—persuasively professed political opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]