This chapter discusses how writers in the twenty-first century have responded to the legacies of postmodernism. It details various attempts at configuring a post-postmodernism before offering close analysis of a series of British writers who have entered a critical dialogue with postmodernism through their fiction. The novelists are discussed with respect to three main areas. First, the identification of an ethical turn in selected fiction produced by writers associated with postmodernism whose careers were established in the last quarter of the twentieth century (Amis, Barnes, Byatt, McEwan, Winterson). Second, British writers who emerge after 9/11 who, although they adopt several techniques associated with postmodernism, incorporate a new, tentative idealism and elements of realism in terms of both literary form and philosophical belief (Mitchell, Barker, Ali Smith). Third, it looks at how discourses around postcolonialism and multiculturalism impact with postmodernism in selected fiction (Ali, Levy, Rushdie, Zadie Smith).

One of postmodernism’s legacies is ironically that, once it is assumed to be over its characteristic self-consciousness about its own historicity has come to permeate ‘post-postmodern’ culture. This chapter considers why critics and theorists were so keen, especially in the first decade of the Twenty-First Century, to declare postmodernism over and to identify what has replaced it. What does this preoccupation with periodicity mean for a society which – due to advances in digital technology – now shares, more widely, a similar uncertainty about its own position in history? The work of some notable twenty-first-century British writers – aware of writing in postmodernism’s slipstream – can usefully be seen as responding to this question. The chapter examines three in particular: Ali Smith’s The Accidental, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Each of these novels conveys a historical ‘out-of-time-ness’, which implies that, ghost-like, the postmodern has both ended and continued.

This chapter is about the flourishing of a variety of distinctively postmodern ‘alternative realisms’ in the early Twenty-First Century, which are predicated on the ontological questions Brian McHale famously identified as a recurrent element of postmodernism. It shows how a range of novels – especially examples by David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Maggie Gee and Kazuo Ishiguro – are charged with a postmodern sense that literature evokes a ‘plurality of worlds’, as dream-logic and mundane reality collide in comic and destabilizing ways, and the boundary between the mundane and the magical is rendered porous. These novels, the chapter contends, might productively be considered apocalyptic, a form of narrative in which veiled, hidden or buried stories are revealed. As a result, twenty-first-century alternative realism redoubles the impetus of late twentieth-century postmodernism to convey a distrust of authoritarianism by preserving a sense of the sublime.

This essay suggests that the contemporary moment sees a crisis in the experience of temporality and sequentiality, that can be felt across the anglophone world. There are a set of emerging political and ecological conditions, that offer a serious challenge to the way that we have conceived of the passage of historical time.

It is difficult as a result, the essay argues, to generate clear pictures of the future, either of Europe, or of our wider planetary environment. The essay addresses this crisis, by examining the forms in which some contemporary British authors give poetic expression to the claims that the past has on our experience of time, and by suggesting how such pictures of the past yield new ways of imagining a European future.

This chapter begins from the historical conjecture that, at the level of social and political geography, globalization is best defined by the practical and symbolic parcellisation of social and political space, not through metaphors of borderlessness. Such parcellisation is epitomised by the proliferation of actual enclaves zones such as business parks, gated communities, refugee camps and export processing zones. They also have their fantasy versions, such as the so-called No-Go Zones that, political activists and commenters have alleged, represent areas of effective Muslim secession from secular states such as Britain and France. The chapter considers empirical and theoretical evidence for the break-up of global social space. It concludes by showing how these spaces become important formal and thematic topoi in contemporary literary works by J. G. Ballard, Ali Smith and Caryl Phillips. Other authors discussed include John Berger and Joseph O’Neill.