Introduction: Metamodernism

In October 2015 a group of scholars from Belgium, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland and the United Kingdom convened for a research seminar at Radboud University, Nijmegen to discuss the perceived resurfacing of Modernism in contemporary literature. They examined the literary strategies of authors such as Eimar McBride, Marilynne Robinson, Ian McEwan, David Mitchell, Tom McCarthy, Zadie Smith, Paul Muldoon and a selection of North-American poets, who all seem to be in dialogue with early twentieth-century Modernism. Part of the meeting was dedicated to discussing the two main theoretical texts available at the time on what is now beginning to be known as “Metamodernism”: Timotheus Vermeulen’s and Robin van den Akker’s “Notes on Metamodernism” from 2010 and the 2014 essay “Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and Revolution” by David James and Urmila Seshagiri. Although both texts employ, and seemingly coin, the label “Metamodernism”, the authors’ interpretations of the concept are vastly different. Vermeulen and Van den Akker frame the resurfacing of Modernism as follows:

We [argue] that this modernism is characterized by an oscillation between a typically modern commitment and a markedly postmodern detachment. We call this structure of feeling “metamodernism”. According to the Greek-English lexicon the prefix “meta” refers to such notions as “with”, “between”, and “beyond”. We [use] these connotations of “meta” in a similar, yet not indiscriminate fashion. For we contend that metamodernism should be situated epistemologically with (post) modernism, ontologically between (post) modernism, and historically beyond (post) modernism.¹

In the article they place this “structure of feeling” against a cultural landscape of architecture, film and art, which is marked, they claim, by Postmodernism’s apparent demise. James and Seshagiri, on the other hand, apply the label specifically to literary fiction and identify Metamodernism as a body of artistic products which can be pinpointed to a historical period:

Metamodernism regards modernism as an era, an aesthetic, and an archive that originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The dominant postures of this literary corpus, therefore, clash with the current academic understanding of modernism as a temporally and spatially complex global impulse.²

These diverging interpretations are symptomatic for the sketchiness of the debate on the revival of Modernism in contemporary culture that is only just beginning to unfold. Scholars recognise that Modernist narratological strategies and themes have re-emerged in twenty-first-century fiction, but in 2018 the implications of the trend are still unclear. This special issue of English Studies aims to be a first step towards charting and identifying how Modernism manifests itself in contemporary fiction in English. By bringing together the work of a diverse group of international scholars—who study a group of equally international authors—we hope to shed light on Modernism’s vitality and the place of its legacy in twenty-first-century literary culture.

Nick Bentley’s opening article, titled “Trailing Postmodernism: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Zadie Smith’s NW, and the Metamodern”, serves as a thorough introduction to the question how the overall debate on Metamodernism has impacted the contemporary novel and the critical discussion of new developments in the writing of fiction of the early 2000s. Bentley is especially concerned with the relationship of these development with Postmodernism and Postmodernity, which may not be conveniently described as either constituting a clear break or a complete rejection of aesthetic principles of philosophical assumptions. On the basis of a detailed reading of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and Zadie Smith’s NW (2010), Bentley argues that, when contextualised as Metamodernist, these novels do not fundamentally deviate from Postmodernism aesthetically, even if they do seem to be products of a significantly different philosophical outlook. In the process, he puts into perspective those definitions of Metamodernism that are most dominant in the general debate and arrives at the conclusion that it may be too early to apply definitive labels to the “post-Postmodernist” era—for example, in relation to the most influential twentieth-century modes of writing.

In “The Likeness of Modernism in Marilynne Robinson’s Fiction”, Robin Vogelzang complements Bentley’s British focus by investigating the combination of “traditional”, Modernist and Postmodernist strains in the work of the American author Marilynne Robinson. Vogelzang reads Robinson’s use of metaphor in her first and most recent novels (respectively, Housekeeping from 1980 and Lila from 2014) to understand what she calls “Anglo-American modernism’s contemporary face”. Thus, she explicitly asks the question how Robinson’s fiction relates to early twentieth-century Modernism, not necessarily in response to the end of Postmodernism. As she shows when discussing the author’s non-fictional writing, Robinson herself denounces periodising conceptions of literary movements and writing modes while eschewing nostalgic approaches to the heritage of Modernism. Vogelzang suggests that Robinson’s novels could be categorised as belonging to the New Sincerity and Metamodernism as defined by Vermeulen and Van den Akker, as she recognises their “continual back and forth between the legacies of modernism and postmodernism periods” in Robinson’s exploration of metaphor and the “oscillation between opposing qualities” in her work.

Yet another perspective on Metamodernism and how it takes shape in fiction is offered by Nick Lavery in his essay “Consciousness and the Extended Mind in the ‘Metamodernist’ Novel”. Lavery returns to the British novel with his analyses of Will Self’s Umbrella from 2012 and Ali Smith’s How to be Both from 2014 and approaches those from a contemporary philosophical perspective with the intent of scrutinising their representations of the working of the mind. Vermeulen and Van den Akker key concept of “oscillation” also plays an important part in Lavery’s understanding of the way in which both Umbrella and How to be Both depict their main characters’ reactions to their environment and how these feature in their experiences of consciousness as constituting a sense of “self”. To Lavery, both novels hint at the possibility of widening “the scope of metamodernism […] by taking the oscillation it reads into some contemporary art as an expression of a more fundamental dynamic within human consciousness”.

In his essay titled “Retracing Mischief: ‘Fol de rol’ and (Irish) Modernist Pastiche (Muldoon-Yeats-Trench-Farquhar)”, Wit Pietrzak situates the work of contemporary poet Paul Muldoon in a tradition of Irish writers who employ a form of pastiche that borders on parody. This line can be traced back to the seventeenth century, and arguably peaked with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, whose work reverberates in Muldoon’s. Pietrzak focuses on one line of verse in particular: “Fol de rol de rolly O”, which has been employed by authors such as George Farquhar, Herbert Trench, and W. B. Yeats, and in 2006 by Muldoon in his poem “At Least They Weren’t Speaking French”. Pietrzak observes that Muldoon’s work may be classified as Metamodernist because it not only balances “postmodern levity” with a commitment to uncovering “the deep structures of social economy”, but also combines playfulness and seriousness. Although Muldoon’s employment of intertextuality and pastiche seems to be more in line with Postmodernist writing, Pietrzak argues that the poet’s interpretation of them stems from Joyce’s High Modernism.

Finally, as the title of her essay “Eimear McBride’s Ireland: A Case for Periodisation and the Dangers of Marketing Modernism” reveals, Ruth Gilligan supports James’s and Seshagiri’s return to the historicising of Modernism, while also taking an infrastructural approach. Comparing Ireland’s current cultural moment to early twentieth-century Modernism, she traces parallels between these two productive eras for Irish experimental writing. Gilligan’s essay diverts from the other contributions to this collection in that she highlights the problematic position of experimental female writers and the gendered marketing of Metamodernist literature. By analysing how various actors in the literary field frame female voices such as Eimar McBride’s, she uncovers how their fiction is subjected “to the kind of patriarchal frameworks their work deliberately attempts to write back against”. Gilligan’s examination of reactionary, canon-confirming, gendered mechanisms in the labelling of literature chimes in with our own research project, in which we aim, through a synthesis of quantitative and qualitative analyses, to define how labels like “Modernism” are used by authors, critics, publishers and readers. Our first results confirm some of the concerns expressed in Gilligan’s essay: terms like “Modernism” are never politically, culturally or economically neutral and require further examination.

This special issue on Metamodernist literature in English comes at a moment when the academic debate about the concept is beginning to emerge and take shape. As these five essays demonstrate, the “Metamodernism” label—and its relationship to the supposed demise of Postmodernism and resurfacing of Modernism—sometimes yields clashing interpretations, which can ultimately be traced back to the definitions offered by Vermeulen and Van den Akker on the one hand and James and Seshagiri on the other. By combining close readings of Metamodernist fiction and poetry with a broader cultural-historical analysis the authors in this special issue test the label’s usefulness and suggest how it may help to chart and define an increasingly pervasive trend in contemporary English-language fiction and poetry. Their essays also, albeit mostly implicitly, raise questions about the function of such labels in the academic debate and the wider literary field.

Some of these provocative issues will undoubtedly become the topic of discussion in the coming two years through the AHRC-funded “Metamodernism” network, which, like the present special issue, was a product of the 2015 research seminar organised in Nijmegen. Between January 2018 and December 2019 a group of international and multidisciplinary scholars will convene in several symposia to reflect on the various aspects that make up contemporary Metamodernist literature, while also exploring its relationship with the legacies of Postmodernism and early twentieth-century (High) Modernism. This issue of English Studies aims to provide a springboard for a scholarly debate which has presumably only just begun.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Vermeulen and van den Akker.

2 James and Seshagiri, 88.