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Chapter 14 - The End of Postmodernism?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2025

Bran Nicol
Affiliation:
University of Surrey
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Summary

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.

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  • The End of Postmodernism?
  • Edited by Bran Nicol, University of Surrey
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to British Postmodern Fiction
  • Online publication: 07 August 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009585903.016
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  • The End of Postmodernism?
  • Edited by Bran Nicol, University of Surrey
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to British Postmodern Fiction
  • Online publication: 07 August 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009585903.016
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The End of Postmodernism?
  • Edited by Bran Nicol, University of Surrey
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to British Postmodern Fiction
  • Online publication: 07 August 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009585903.016
Available formats
×