‘Experimentalism and the Novel in Irish, 1970–2000’ begins with the observation that, since the novel in Irish really only came into being in the first decade of the twentieth century, there is a sense in which all novels in the Irish language are, to some extent, experiments, and the timelines for experimentation in the Irish novel are more condensed than is the case with the novel in English. Novels had only been written in Irish for forty years when Brian Ó Nualláin wrote the surreal, heavily intertextual An Béal Bocht (1941). By the 1970s, sustained state and university support for Irish-language publishing meant that authors in the language were in a position to take risks with literary form, and, by the 1980s, many were actively engaging with ideas drawn from post-structuralism and postmodernism, resulting in novels such as Séamas Mac Annaidh’s Cuaifeach Mo Lon Dubh Buí (1983).

‘History and the Irish Novel After 1970’ considers the place of the historical novel in Ireland at the period during which the conflict in Northern Ireland gave questions of history an urgent political relevance. Opening with Iris Murdoch’s novel about the 1916 Rising, The Red and the Green (1965), it is argued that the same decades that brought about a questioning of traditional nationalist historiography (which became known in Ireland as historical revisionism) also challenged novelists to find new ways of narrating Irish history. Simultaneously, there was the emerging challenge of post-structuralism and postmodernism to historiography and narrativity. It is in this context that we can read novels such as Thomas Flanagan’s The Year of the French (1979), Eilís Dillon’s Across the Bitter Sea (1973), Jennifer Johnston’s The Captains and the Kings (1972), Francis Stuart’s Black List, Section H (1971), and William Trevor’s The Silence in the Garden (1988).

Drawing from the analysis of the prior argument, this chapter describes how the Marxist utopianism of Fredric Jameson plumbs a deeper reading of the political unconscious capitalist culture to illuminate how, despite the pervading sense of dominance, antagonisms remain, opening possibilities for transformation. In the end, however, his utopianism remains a politics of via negativa and, thus, unable to provide a real alternative.

War writing during the Cold War era begins under the shadow of the atomic bomb and ends on the eve of the First Persian Gulf War. During these decades, millions of American soldiers participated in the operations in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and other locations. Literature written by veterans and civilians alike portrays a common allegiance to Cold War mindsets while revealing a deep alienation from military and political authorities. The Cold War paradigm of dualism between “us” and “them” is thus both rehearsed and repeatedly undermined in many of these writings, including works by Richard Matheson, James Salter, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Ron Kovic, and Gustav Hasford. This chapter will examine how the Cold War produced a wide range of disenchanted war fiction and poetry that navigated the binary ideology of the time often by blurring the distinction between the two poles and questioning some myths while holding onto others.

Ursula Le Guin’s 1985 novel Always Coming Home begins with a temporal paradox. The people it depicts, the Kesh, “might,” we are told, “be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California.” Yet, unlike many Cold War fictions that imagined a dystopian nuclear future, it seeks a sustainable vision beyond the constraints of 1980s perspectives. This chapter reads Always Coming Home for how its experimental postmodern form, conceived in the novel as “an archaeology of the future,” consisting of the Kesh’s stories, folklore, dances, music, architecture, pottery, and much more besides – a scrapbook of found future objects – both emerges from the social and cultural matrices of the Cold War, and imagines a world beyond it. The late Cold War moment is poised uneasily, here, between multiple futures that “might” succeed the postmodern: apocalyptic destruction or ecological reengagement; acquisitive economic exploitation or negotiated sharing of resources.

This chapter studies how Mark Twain moved the representation of climate control from the intra-diegetic plot to the extra-diegetic level of authorial narration in The American Claimant (1892). Drawing on the nascent practice of large-scale climate control by business-minded engineers such as Edward Powers and Robert Dyrenforth, backed by the US government, Twain granted the reader of his proto-modernist novel climatic agency at the same time that the influential mapmaker and publisher Levi Walter Yaggy was granting climatic agency to US pupils through his interactive representation of the planet in his Geographical Study (1887) and Portfolio (1893). Making anthropogenic climate change a narrative form, the chapter concludes that Twain’s proto-modernist work shows how fiction prescribes our understanding of climate, but also how the notion of climate control influenced his fiction: the novel’s universe becomes susceptible to readerly change, providing a proto-modernist challenge to the stable diegetic confines of the realist novel.

Martin Amis’s prose style has been profoundly influential, and so has the consistency with which he foregrounded questions of style in his fiction and non-fiction. This chapter discusses what Amis meant when he spoke about style. It also discusses what it might be possible to say about style as such and argues that we can only really argue about a given style. It goes on to anatomise Martin Amis’s prose style using the tools of close reading, quoting from his novels Money and Time’s Arrow as well as his memoir Experience and his short story ‘The Coincidence of the Arts’. It discusses Amis’s style as a hybrid of postmodern and liberal-humanist insights into the nature of the world; as essentially urban; as positing style as a dandified response to British post-imperial decline; and, finally, as intrinsically comic.

Martin Amis’s first three fictional works both embody and illuminate his complicated relationship and attitude to genre. In all three – The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, and Success – Amis appropriates existing genres or genre tropes while eluding many of their strictures. He does so by employing distinctly postmodern narrative strategies (unreliable narrators, intertextuality, metafictional asides, parody, pastiche) that emphasise the subjective nature of reality and destabilise traditional ideas of identity and agency. The resulting hybrid fictions blur boundaries not only between genres but between individuals and the cultural discourses that shape their consciousness.

Employing the historiographical model laid out by Walter Benjamin in his 1925 Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, this chapter suggests that the work of five very different and in some cases obscure composers can be taken to form a constellation that outlines the ‘idea’ of the British symphony. This idea involves a commitment to social democracy. The chapter argues for an identification of the British symphony with the ‘Cheltenham Symphony’ of the later 1940s and 1950s, grasped here as a musical embodiment of the post-war ethos of collective reconstruction. Anticipated by the oppositional leftism of Alan Bush’s Symphony in C, the post-war wave of symphonic composition saw the instantiation of a socialist realism in British music. The chapter suggests that the subsequent decline of the British symphony reflects a broader loss of confidence in the post-war project, leading to what could be interpreted as the death of the genre amid the Thatcherite devastation of the 1980s.

This chapter explores William Burroughs’ equivocal position within the American literary canon, examining both the institutional challenges to his inclusion and the theoretical strategies scholars have used to argue for his legitimacy. Sean Bolton traces critical attempts to align Burroughs with modernism, postmodernism, and even a proposed “amodernist” tradition, while also acknowledging the persistent difficulty of assimilating his work into stable frameworks of interpretation. Drawing on Harold Bloom’s aesthetics of canonicity, poststructuralist theory, and his own concept of “narrative revolution,” Bolton contends that Burroughs’ formal innovations – particularly the cut-up method and fragmented subjectivities – both exemplify and exceed existing literary categories. Ultimately, the chapter questions whether Burroughs needs the canon at all, suggesting that his enduring cultural influence may rest precisely on his resistance to assimilation. For readers and scholars alike, Burroughs remains an outsider by design, a figure whose work continues to provoke, disturb, and inspire on its own uncompromising terms.

This chapter focuses the fractures in urban space created by racialized capitalism in the final decades of the twentieth century. Shoop distils discourses of neoliberal-era Los Angeles by drawing into dialogue the contrasting readings of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel proffered by Fredric Jameson and Mike Davis. Shoop explores Joan Didion’s expression of White paranoia over demographic changes as expressed in The White Album, setting Didion’s racial anxieties alongside the forms of Chicano resistance and historical memory articulated in Luis Valdez’s play Zoot Suit (1979). Shoop then examines how Carolyn See’s Golden Days (1986) and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle (1996) satirically criticize racial liberalism and suburban whiteness. The chapter concludes by discussing the fractured, global Los Angeles as it emerges in the wake of the 1992 LA Uprising, in Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993) and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997).

A shared relationship to the city of Paterson, New Jersey, provided common ground for Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams. A key figure in modernist poetry, Williams helped to modernize Ginsberg’s verse through both example and personal instruction. The influence is especially notable in the early work collected in Ginsberg’s Empty Mirror and in poems of the mid 1950s, leading up to Howl, published with an introduction by Williams. Eventually, the two diverged over the structure of the poetic line and the relation of the poet to popular culture. Nevertheless, both in his poetry and in his teaching, Ginsberg continued to honor Williams as one of his masters.

A hallmark of wise deliberative spaces is their commitment to truth-seeking, in contrast to “post-truth” contexts where emotional appeals and personal beliefs are more important than objective facts. Chapter 5 explores how post-truth thinking has been fueled by cognitive elites across the political spectrum and traces its roots to postmodernist ideas. The chapter reviews philosophical definitions of truth, contrasting idealist and coherentist views with realist theories, specifically correspondence, semantic, and pragmatic approaches. It draws on Hilary Putnam’s concept of natural realism to argue that objective truths do exist – depending on the domain of inquiry – but only if we distinguish between what is true and what is merely believed to be true. Postpositivism supports this by recognizing an external reality while acknowledging that our knowledge is fallible and evolving. Biases, though inevitable, can be countered through reflexive and communal inquiry. Ultimately, the chapter argues that wisdom lies in understanding the nature of different kinds of inquiry – scientific, moral, or otherwise – without falling into the trap of relativism.

This essay accounts for the pervasive presence of technology in Elizabeth Bowen’s life and writing, arguing that her work develops a nuanced, often ambivalent engagement with technological modernity. From her first novel, The Hotel, to the late and idiosyncratic Eva Trout, Bowen presents technology not merely as a backdrop but as a dynamic force shaping identity, social interaction, and temporal awareness. The chapter traces how Bowen’s characters interact with technological objects – including cars, telephones, radios, and computers – not only as tools but as extensions of the self and mediators of experience. Drawing on D. W. Winnicott’s theory of transitional objects, it demonstrates how Bowen’s characters use technology to navigate psychological development and social belonging. This culminates in a reading of Eva Trout, in which technology becomes a totalising force, anticipating postmodern concerns with cyborg identity and media saturation, and positioning Bowen as a prescient analyst of the evolving relationship between humans and machines.

This chapter describes the excitement surrounding scientific progress as a driver of medical progress in the Cold War and subsequent theoretical and practical challenges. Medicine, for skeptical theories, was a powerful example that there is no such thing as knowledge that continually approaches the truth, that even the body is historical, and that knowledge is always a tool of the powerful. From the medical side, some respondents were adamant that scientific knowledge about the body is “real” and that medicine is uniquely immune to uncertainties inherent in relativistic accounts of knowledge. The chapter concludes by analyzing two recent examples, evidence-based medicine and health artificial intelligence, which have been praised as objective examples of a particular kind of medical knowledge progress. Throughout, I show the implications for medical progress of larger debates about the progress of knowledge, as well as how an excessive focus on biomedical knowledge gains neglects other, important dimensions of progress.

Fashion – the way we dress – is often an important reflection of the zeitgeist or the spirit of a given point and place in time. The fashion phenomena of recent years, such as self-disruption, upcycling and phygital experiences, can be studied as characteristics of a post-postmodern condition where a new cultural paradigm has emerged. The term post-postmodern has appeared in an increasing number of scholarly works that address a new cultural milieu – one that faces shifting global political centres and geopolitical boundaries, threats of climate change and an endangered ecosystem, destabilisation from armed conflicts and pandemics, obsessions with autonomous individuality, accelerating advances in artificial intelligence and the pervasiveness of information and communications technology in our daily lives. This chapter explores how such theories may be relevant to understanding contemporary fashion trends and their implications for intellectual property laws.

This chapter focuses on the careers of Ivana Loudová (1941–2017) and Sylvie Bodorová (born 1954), two prominent Czech female composers who embarked on their careers in different historical phases of communist Czechoslovakia, dealt with specific cultural-political circumstances, and reacted to distinct domestic and global music styles. Whereas Loudová began her career in the liberal 1960s, a time when Czech artists started to embrace Western avant-garde styles, Bodorová’s work took shape during the normalization era following the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact countries. This period officially rejected the reforms of the previous decade and sought to reinstate the aesthetics of socialist realism, which had dominated Czech culture after the communists initially came to power in Czechoslovakia in 1948. Although the two composers were significantly influenced by prominent state music institutions, they also developed unique compositional styles.

This epilogue offers a rumination on the continuing place of the modernist theatre in the plays and performance practices of the latter twentieth century and beyond. It begins with the aesthetic disputes staged within Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, written and set at the cusp of the transition from the modern to the postmodern. The shadow of modernism looms large over Hansberry’s characters, just as it does over many of the plays and productions to follow. From the evergreen influence of the avant-gardists to the long-lasting legacy of a figure like Bertolt Brecht to the perpetual restagings and radical rewriting of works by Henrik Ibsen or August Strindberg, the figures and aesthetics of the modernist era permeate and help give shape to the postmodern. Far from a retrograde revolution, modernism may best be regarded as a still-living mode of aesthetic and theatrical practice.

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.