ABSTRACT
William Faulkner’s much-quoted dictum that the ‘past is never dead. It’s not even past’ evokes a key characteristic of post-millennial modernity. Instead of dwindling into insignificance, as, in turn, the rhetoric of modernism, then postmodernism and then globalization suggested, the past’s grip on the present has become even stronger. Indeed, what I name ‘the resurgent past’ is a distinctive and dominant theme of much contemporary fiction and the focus of this chapter.
