Metamodernism: Modernist Elements in Contemporary British and Irish Fiction
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2018-08-22
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en
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This thesis aims at exploring in what way three contemporary novels, C by Tom McCarthy
(2010), A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride (2013), and How to Be Both by
Ali Smith (2014), can be seen as “Metamodernist”. The theoretical framework that will be
applied to this thesis is that of literary modernism and Metamodernism, which is a recently
emerged concept used to describe what is currently happening in the British literary field.
This research is guided by the following question: How does modernism manifest itself in
Tom McCarthy’s C, Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, and Ali Smith's How
to Be Both, and what does this say about the novels’ relation to Metamodernism? This
question will be answered by charting which modernist narrative techniques and modernist
themes are used in the novels through textual analysis, as well as connecting these to David
James and Urmila Seshagiri’s definition of Metamodernism. This thesis argues that the three
novels return to modernism in different ways, but that they can all be related to
Metamodernism. Literary modernism can thus be seen as a cultural archive that is used by
contemporary novelists as a source of inspiration.
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Faculteit der Letteren