How to be both a Metamodernist Work?

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2020-07-03

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en

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The theoretical framework by scholars David James & Urmila Seshagiri that presents modernism as a cultural archive is used, and it explores if Ali Smith has used Virginia Woolf’s modernist characteristics in Orlando as an inspiration for her novel How to be both, and if the latter can thus be seen as a metamodernist work according to James and Seshagiri. It explores (meta)modernism illustrated in the chosen novels: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and Ali Smith’s How to be both (2014). It focuses on the constructs of gender and time; elaborates on crossing boundaries in the conventional idea of the binarity of gender, and on crossing boundaries in the mental and physical experience of time which conventionally is perceived as linear. It concludes that modernism and Orlando indeed functioned as a cultural archive and an inspiration for metamodernism and specifically How to be both.

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