Joyce’s repudiation of Catholic Ireland and his countering declaration of artistic independence are well-known and integral features of his life-long dedication to writing. The most important of Joyce’s Irish predecessors was the poet James Clarence Mangan (1803–1849), whose tragic life was represented by Joyce as an emblem of the fate of the Irish artist, betrayed through identification of himself with his country. Joyce’s obsession with betrayal manifests itself in the lectures he delivered on Mangan, in Dublin in 1902 and in Trieste in 1907. Wherever he looked, in Irish political or literary history, he found betrayal. The great political crisis that dominated his early life – the fall of Parnell – governed this reading of his country’s past and helped him define the nature of the embattled relationship between him and his Irish audience. Parnell was, in Joyce’s view, a heroic spirit brought low by his own people, who listened to Parnell’s plea that they should not throw him to the English wolves.

Readers have very credibly seen their most innovative concepts about gender reflected in James Joyce’s works. Joyce presented gender as it affects our attempts to live collectively and on shared terms, suggesting that gender flexibility is crucial to understanding human community, the polis, and thus the political. He explored gender as a physical experience, a socially intersectional construction, a performative speech act, and a phenomenological gesture while consistently challenging the stability of gender difference. Joyce’s famously ambiguous prose remains the creative strength of his oeuvre, which may put political and social wrongs to right by witnessing to a long history of gender-based violence, but equally may perpetuate old ideals in the service of strange comedy. His texts place responsibility on the reader to make meaning and justice in the world, while his words also provide readers with more fluid possibilities to counter the old inequities of the sex/gender system.

This chapter traces the emergence of Joyce’s aesthetic from Stephen Hero to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, analyzing the development of Stephen Dedalus as would-be artist in the context of Irish colonial experience. It pays particular attention to the influence of Oscar Wilde. Both Wilde’s Picture of Doran Gray and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist belong to the Bildungsroman tradition, that is, to the novel of development, which their narratives challenge and transform by presenting the central character’s growth to maturity as deviating from cultural expectations rather than fulfilling them. Joyce’s narrative, however, points toward a new nation’s emergence.

One of the concerns of postmodern British fiction was the textual and discursive means by which historical events are communicated to the present through story-telling. Much post-millennial fiction still dips into the postmodern toolbox; it is not unusual to read novels with a fragmented and non-linear narrative, for example, but these novels focus instead on the now, while asking what does it mean to be now, to recognise that the past and the present exist simultaneously, and how does this translate into an understanding of temporality. As Lauren Berlant has argued, neoliberal economic policies mobilize instability, and that instability is evident in contemporary fiction’s representations of history, genre and identity. Some novels examined here invoke past and present through an illusion of narrative simultaneity, while others investigate how the powerful can write and rewrite the present and the past and in doing so can disrupt perceptions of temporality.

This chapter explores the connections between ‘queer’ theory, which emerged in the 1990s, and postmodernism. Postmodern literary practice, which glories in the ephemeral, the performative, and the fluid and the contradictory, aligns with the spirit of queer theory and its mission to liberate identities dismissed as marginal or non-normative. However, where late-twentieth-century queer writers exposed and challenged homophobic discourses that sought to demonise and deny queer desire (often in direct response to social circumstances, such as the effects of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Britain in 1967 and the Aids epidemic in the 1980s), the Twenty-First Century has become distinguished by an increasing ‘homonormativity’. This does not mark the end of hostile queer-eradicating discourses, but means that these are at least challenged by an empowering counter-narrative. The chapter examines a wide range of postmodern writing, including work by Jeanette Winterson, Hanif Kureishi, and Alan Hollinghurst, Sarah Waters, and Paul Magrs.

Joyce’s life spans a period when material conditions, political structures, and intellectual life throughout the world were profoundly shaped by the growth and decline of European empires and the flourishing of various nationalisms, both imperialist and anti-imperialist. When Joyce was born in 1882 the ‘scramble for Africa’ and the era that one influential historian has called the ‘age of empire’ had just begun. When he died in 1941 the world was engulfed in WWII, a conflict that would fundamentally alter the balance of global power, and the age of decolonization was under way. A good deal of influential Joyce scholarship has explored Joyce’s relation to this historical trajectory. Much of it has been informed by postcolonial studies, committed to examining the complex set of issues and questions we can group under the general headings of ‘colonialism’ and ‘nationalism’. Ireland’s double status as both centre and periphery, agent and victim of colonialism is important to any investigation of how Joyce’s works engage with such issues and questions.

This chapter analyses the changing reception of ‘declinism’ and its evolving depiction in British postmodern fiction. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, there existed a tradition of characterising Britain by its lack of enthusiasm for science, the indifference of government to commerce, and the low status of research and development, industry, and engineering. Numerous political scientists, economists, columnists, and historians drew on ‘decline’ as an interpretative framework despite many disagreements about its meaning, evidence, causes, and remedies. At mid-century, postmodern British writers created analogies between narratives of national decline and stories of individual dissolution. Following the Thatcher administration, they offered nascent critiques of ‘declinism’, presenting it as a discourse rather than historical fact. Finally, late-twentieth-century writers joined the growing ranks of professional historians who sought to debunk ‘declinism’ and caution against nostalgia for a halcyon past that may not have ever existed.

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."

Whilst discussions of British and American fiction often depend upon binary oppositions (tradition vs. experimentation, etc.), this chapter argues that the longer arc of British postmodern fiction is better understood in less polarising terms that instead reflect the overlaps, migrations, exchanges, and economic realignments that emerging technologies introduced in the late twentieth century. This argument hinges upon reading Martin Amis’s Money as a particularly prescient example of a transatlantic network novel. Amis’s seminal text reconceives the oceanic divide not simply in terms of American financial power, but specifically in terms of developing computer technologies: the chapter argues that Money’s network-inflected conception of space, as well as its signature stylistic and formal innovations, interweave British and American cultural spaces in an exemplary fashion, the legacy of which can be traced through the millennium into major novels that enact British postmodernism’s afterlife by Hari Kunzru, Tom McCarthy, David Mitchell, and Zadie Smith.

This chapter opens the collection by challenging the widespread assumptions that postmodernism is over as a literary period, and waning in its value as a critical framework. While we have moved beyond the late-twentieth century ‘peak’ period of postmodernism, its legacy continues to actually quite a notable degree in contemporary British fiction, and postmodernism remains a valuable paradigm to anyone seeking to make sense of prominent currents within twentieth- and twenty-first century British fiction.

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 chapter explores how the postcolonial predicament bequeathed by the British Empire challenges us to rethink conceptions of ‘postmodernism’ and ‘Britishness’. The specifically Anglo-American sense of the close connection between postmodernism and postcolonial studies is established via the identification of ‘grand narrative’ with the ‘civilising mission’, but this equation is problematised through a reading of Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005) and a review of the changing history of British imperial ideology. A different approach to the interplay of fictive and historical narrative is identified in Ngugi we Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat (1967), a novel that locates characteristic postmodern concerns within the late colonial violence of the Kenyan Emergency. The novel is shown to anticipate a contemporary cultural moment in which postmodernism’s choreography of certainty and uncertainty proves increasingly ill-suited.

This chapter looks at the work and critical reception of B.S. Johnson (1933-73), focusing on the influence that the development of the critical term postmodernism on his reputation by dividing it into three stages of two decades each: before postmodernism (1960-1980), during postmodernism (1980-2000) and after postmodernism (2000 to present). It argues that Johnson’s career was essentially proto-postmodernist, engaged in a struggle to undermine the realist hegemony of the 1960s, but that the theoretical concerns of postmodern writing were at odds with his own and it was never a term he used or had the opportunity to refute. As a result his work remained unassimilable while postmodernism held sway and only later- with the aid of a biography- could criticism get to grips with Johnson’s double-coded rejection of convention and commitment to his own brand of social realism.