Deconstructing the Traditional Family Representation in Nick Hornby’s About a Boy and Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy

Abstract

This paper sets out to examine the traditional family in contemporary British fiction with focus on Nick Hornby’s About a Boy and Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy. The second half of the twentieth century witnessed many changes in the structure of family formation and family behaviour that resulted in a diversification of family forms. Consequently, it has become more and more difficult to use a general or universally acceptable definition to define the the term ‘family.’ Using Jean-Francois Lyotard’s decentring, or better still, lack of fixity as well as Louis Montrose’s inextricable link between literature and history and Jacques Derrida’s a ‘decentered universe’, the paper interrogates and deconstructs typologies of family set-ups emanating from the traditional family as depicted in Nick Hornby’s About a Boy and Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy. The paper therefore intimates that there is no ‘death of the family’ as heralded by some critics like Judith Stacey in her discourse geared towards ‘rethinking family values in the postmodern age,’ but rather a dramatic, and profound transformation. It further reveals that the literary representations of the family now include other types of families that have thus expanded the paradigm of the family to what is perceived in this study as triad, which, even though challenged, does not substitute the traditional family