Narratives of metamodern selfhood in contemporary British fiction

Postmodernism, as the dominant paradigm of the late twentieth century, is no longer pertinent to the contemporary cultural moment. Postmodern scepticism towards grand narratives has been replaced with a celebration of a human desire to revisit and celebrate such narratives. Within this context, the return of selfhood as a metanarrative calls for the negotiation of contemporary models of selfhood wherein this negotiation aligns with a growing structure of feeling known within scholarly communities as metamodernism. This thesis focuses on the representation of a metamodern model of self in contemporary British fiction. This model, without completely breaking with postmodern precepts, explores the complexities of self as it moves beyond narratives of cynicism and irony while simultaneously engaging with a reconstruction of meaning. While the first chapter of the thesis is concerned with my cultural theorization of metamodern selfhood, the remaining three concentrate on providing a literary interpretation of this metamodern self. The major literary texts under investigation are Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist (2002) and Red Pill (2019), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun, and Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man (2002) and NW (2012). By means of an in-depth analytical examination of these texts, I demonstrate how the respective novelists’ engagement with the themes of consciousness, affect and existentialism situate their perspective on selfhood within a metamodern structure of feeling. The general contribution of this thesis is twofold: first of all, it theorizes a contemporary model of self which is in accordance with the metamodern sensibility. Secondly, it accounts for the position of metamodern selfhood within a wider contemporary, cultural and literary discussion of the human condition in the twenty first century.