At first glance, Joyce’s shorter works – his poems and epiphanies, Giacomo Joyce, and Exiles – seem to bear a tenuous relationship to the books for which Joyce has become famous. It is questionable whether the epiphanies and Giacomo Joyce should even be called ‘works’: Joyce published neither in its original form, choosing instead to loot both for the more ambitious undertakings that followed. Only forty of at least seventy-one epiphanies are extant, and their relationship to one another had to be reconstructed from manuscript evidence: the sketches that comprise Giacomo Joyce were similarly composed, arranged, and abandoned, but not destroyed. Chamber Music, although published in 1907, was orphaned when Joyce delegated the final arrangement of the poems to his brother Stanislaus. Pomes Penyeach, as the title suggests, is a modest offering of twelve and a tilly poetic ‘fruits’. Only Exiles continued to hold Joyce’s interest as an autonomous composition not destined for immediate verbal recycling.

Joyce wrote as a kind of archaeologist: Ulysses, Henri Lefebvre wrote, marked ‘the momentous eruption of everyday life into literature’, in which Joyce’s sprawling prose ‘rescues, one after the other, each facet of the quotidian from anonymity’. Famously, Joyce even risked censorship in order to drag into view details about the career of the human body that other novelists had ignored. This chapter analyzes Joyce’s engagement with the everyday by focusing on scenes of mourning, when the everyday suddenly becomes at once visible and painfully fragile. These moments – funerals, wakes, and death rites – constitute a steady yet largely unexamined through-line running from Joyce’s first story to his last novel. Death itself is at once the most common and the most shocking of experiences, an event that rends the fabric of our everyday life as we try to readjust our habits around an often abrupt and painful absence. Seen this way, Joyce’s works become not only archaeological digs into the ever-vanishing everyday but also documents of human and cultural resilience amid the fury of modernity.

Postmodernity is characterised by a thoroughgoing alteration in the ways in which space is both experienced and conceived. During the post-war period, social and spatial relations were substantially transformed by the far-reaching effects of economic globalisation, neo-imperial conflicts, new transport and communications technologies, mass migrations, political devolution, and impending environmental crisis. Concurrently, space and geography have become existential and cultural dominants for postmodern societies, to an extent displacing time and history. Given such a spatio-temporal conjuncture, this chapter explores the significance of space for British postmodern fiction and describes some of its characteristic geographies, focusing upon three distinctive kinds of spaces: cities; non-places; and regions. Among the texts discussed are novels by J.G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Christine Brooke-Rose, Angela Carter, Maureen Duffy, Alasdair Gray, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Iain Sinclair, Zadie Smith, Graham Swift, Adam Thorpe, and Jeanette Winterson.

This chapter surveys the centrality of sex and sexuality to Joyce’s modernist experiment. Representing sexuality was vital to Joyce’s creative method because it demanded strategies that would define his prose: ambiguity, ellipsis, opacity, and obscurity. Gaps and silences marked the emergence of an inchoate modernism that characterized Joyce’s writing about sex – the subject of his fiction where form and content were most intimately entangled. A self-consciously radical frankness was essential to his commitment to innovation of subject and style, as he sought to define his creative practice against the ‘prudery’ of an imagined Victorianism. Sexual daring became an important aspect of his success in establishing himself at the heart of experimental international modernism, through little magazines and coterie publishing houses.

This chapter focuses on Neo-Victorian fiction as a sub-genre of the historical novel. It examines how British neo-Victorian texts are informed by Anglo-American and European postmodernist theories that challenged the division between history and literature. In this context, it contains discussions of a wide range of novels including Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990), and Sarah Waters’s Victorian trilogy that have now become part of an ever-growing Neo-Victorian canon, while also engaging with more recent manifestations of Neo-Victorianism in TV and film adaptations. It explores how Neo-Victorianism has intersected with British political discourse; how authors’ investment in Britain’s history and Victorian literary culture problematises the Neo-Victorian novel’s position in the academy; the form’s perceived prestige; and its contribution to debates surrounding accuracy and authenticity to argue that neo-Victorianism can be read as a symptom of decadent postmodernity.

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.