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.

With one or two exceptions, British postmodernism came late, but it showed remarkable staying power. Not less remarkable is the fact that it never was very postmodern. Although it freely uses the postmodern techniques and strategies that we are familiar with, it avoids the narcissistic self-referentiality, the play for the sake of play, the radical relativism, the so-called decentring of the individual, and other vices that postmodernism has often been accused of. Its play with the conventions of realism is affectionate rather than hostile and betrays a compassionate interest in the individual and in larger social concerns rather than an affinity with postmodern theory. The argument draws on both early and recent postmodern fiction by writers such as Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Nicola Barker and David Mitchell.

"A new development as postmodern fiction in Britain moved into the 1980s was the stronger presence of writers from Black British and British Asian backgrounds. This reshaping of the literary landscape, as the work of culturally diverse authors contained a renewed concentration on ethnic and historical difference, paralleled the full transformation of Britain into a multicultural nation following the migration of people to the country from the Caribbean, South East Asia and Africa from the 1950s.

However, while the postmodern remains a useful paradigm, challenging established narratives, deconstructing hierarchies, and offering counter-discourses, certain British authors strived to escape the deconstructive pessimism of postmodern identity politics to create new formations of cultural interdependence. Through a close reading of authors such as Hari Kunzru, Zadie Smith and Bernardine Evaristo, this chapter argues for the emergence of the transglossic in fiction, a paradigm that concerns an alignment of aesthetics and ethico-political imperatives and captures an emergent cosmopolitan mode that moves beyond postmodern representation."

This chapter unpacks how the discourse of postmodernism has informed conceptions of Scottish literary fiction since the 1980s. Focusing on the works of Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Janice Galloway, Irvine Welsh, and Suhayl Saadi, it suggests that circumspection is required when reading their novels as endorsements of endless textual layers or celebrations of a seemingly liberating plurality of identities and voices. Whilst some works embrace a postmodern playfulness more unambiguously, many of the oft-cited examples of a putatively Scottish ‘postmodern’ tradition resist and challenge the ideological underpinnings of this new (meta)discourse. It therefore seems necessary to detangle these writers’ use of literary strategies which can be labelled postmodern from their overall commitment to mapping the concrete inequalities and divisions that structure the ‘postmodern’ world in their works. Accordingly, this chapter proposes that these writers employ postmodern techniques to counter postmodernism’s own apolitical implications with a quasi ‘post’-postmodern awareness.

This introduction offers an extended reading of David Foster Wallace’s 2000 foray into political journalism, “Up, Simba,” which illustrates what will be the central claim of this book: that literary post-postmodernism is best understood as the means by which left-leaning writers negotiate the neoliberal turn — a version of, rather than an alternative to, this new consensus. To make that case, I trace connections between the communitarian logic of the so-called New Sincerity, the form of post-postmodernism most closely associated with Wallace, and the interventions of Bill Clinton and the New Democrats, who rejected key New Deal principles in favor of a "third way" between liberalism and conservativism. This introduction also historicizes "postcritique" and the various "post-ideological" accounts of neoliberal culture, accounts which, in my view, reproduce contemporary liberalism’s ambivalence about the free market and free-market politics, and therefore can be understood as symptomatic of the very changes they seek to interpret.

This chapter explores texts that articulate the differences and continuities between Reaganite neoliberalism, as represented by Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, and Clintonian neoliberalism, as represented in Clinton’s own speeches, Joe Klein’s Primary Colors, and the work of Mary Gaitskill. Clinton’s defense of welfare reform attaches a therapeutic rationale to right-wing ideals like “personal responsibility," and we see this same logic in in Gaitskill’s post-feminist interventions into ‘90s-era debates about female masochism and campus sex codes. We also see how this personalizing logic resolves political conflict in her novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin, in which what could be understood as an ideological disagreement about capitalism — the tension between a left-leaning journalist and a follower of a thinly-veiled version of Ayn Rand — proves to be a product of the two women’s failure to take "responsibility" for their own emotional experiences. In this chapter, I also examine how the logic of welfare-reform is contested by novels like Richard Price’s Clockers and Sapphire’s Push, both of which seek to demystify the “workfare” state’s idealization of legal, low-wage work.