This chapter examines the politics of postmodern metafiction. Starting from the widespread view that 1970s postmodernism was “politically abortive” and interested primarily in language games, the chapter sets out to rethink this position. Turning back to the coining of the term “metafiction” by William Gass and considering some major examples of the form (including work by Kurt Vonnegut, among others), the opening half of the chapter introduces the idea that there is a lurking sense of identity politics beneath much canonical metafiction. Tracing lines of continuity with the work of white male modernist authors, the model of metafictional “author gods” is critically examined. The chapter goes on to establish a counter-tradition, making use of the work of bell hooks and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to explore texts that use metafictional devices while resisting any illusion of supra-textual mastery. Samuel R. Delany’s metafictional science fiction epic Dhalgren is posited as the exemplar of this counter-tradition. The chapter makes the case that Delany’s text, overlooked by many scholars of the form, should sit at the center of any discussion of 1970s metafiction. The conclusion includes a brief survey of the implicit politics detectable in some recent examples of metafictional writing.

Less dependent than the novel on the containing medium of the book (codex), the short story has an inherent power to move between different media – the magazine, the spoken word, the anthology, the story cycle, etc. This chapter examines how this transmedial power has impacted the form and content of the short story from the early nineteenth century to the present day. In particular, we examine the impact on the short story of the magazine; the creative writing program; the technology of photography; the spoken voice; and the audio tape. We see how transmediation informs themes such as literary commercialization and craft, and techniques such as realism and metafiction. The authors discussed include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, O. Henry, Ernest Hemingway, Nam Le, Jennifer Egan, Eudora Welty, Charles Chesnutt, Ted Chiang, John Barth, Elizabeth Tallent, and Jenn Alandy Trahan.

Though lauded as radically generically innovative, David Foster Wallace’s work – both in characteristics and range – has a number of antecedents in nineteenth-century Anglophone and other traditions, which ultimately illuminate the relationship between the two main hallmarks of his work: ethical gesture and stylistic complexity. As his reviews and comments on other authors and cultural trends make clear, Wallace was both a debunker of grand claims (in the manner of the Melville who said Emerson gave the impression that “had he lived in those days in which the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions”) and a maker of such claims himself. He was obviously deeply indebted to – and may even have represented a baroque final development of – a consistent nineteenth-century American emphasis (strengthened through the movement for the abolition of slavery) on sympathetic identification as a primary social resource. Wallace combines nineteenth-century literary figures’ blend of the essayistic with the fundamental trajectory of the bildungsroman, within fiction and nonfiction. Through an analysis of Wallace’s forebears and influences, focusing on the American nineteenth century, this chapter proposes that Wallace in fact played the role of a nineteenth-century novelist (at once cultural commentator and artist) in a postmodern context. While Wallace’s ethics always seems starkly accessible, his brand of literariness does not. This is because he brings two central animating features of nineteenth-century American writing’s interventions to their most acute, impossible point: Sympathy becomes incapacitating dissolution, and educative realism approaches unreadability. Understanding this background also provides a new context for the recent diminution of Wallace’s personal reputation: His ethical appeals are not only a hypocritical contrast to private conduct but also an indispensable strategy for a formal obscurity that still sought transformative relevance.

Wallace was a writer deeply aware of his debts to other authors. One such was Vladimir Nabokov, whom Wallace referred to as one of “the real geniuses, the writers who weathered real shock and invented this stuff in contemporary fiction.” Brian Boyd’s pioneering work on Nabokov argues that our need to close-read Nabokov’s novelistic puzzle pieces serves as an allegory for how Nabokov felt we should pay attention to the natural world and all its rich patterning. This chapter uses Boyd’s work on Nabokov as a lens to examine how Wallace engages in a similar practice, using reading as a metonymic practice, a dry run of sorts for encountering the world. The chapter identifies key differences between Wallace and Nabokov, specifically Wallace’s ethical commitment to empathy and otherness, but traces the rich and untapped overlaps between the two authors, examining solipsism, self-reflexivity, allusions and an abiding fascination with both the workings of human consciousness and the relationship between author and reader, among other thematic and formal commonalities. Developing a poetics of attention that is taken up elsewhere in the volume, this chapter works to elucidate how Wallace, after and against Nabokov, used practical literary strategies and tools to persuade and teach his readers to practice empathy in and toward the world.

In the famous 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery, David Foster Wallace called himself “an exhibitionist who wants to hide.” It’s a quote that many Wallace scholars and fans can throw out at a moment’s notice as an example of Wallace’s endearing, self-deprecating wit. However, as self-effacing as that comment may seem, it nevertheless suggests concealment, contradiction, perhaps even deceit. For every aspect of Wallace on display, another remains hidden from view. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way he constructs his biography in his writing. Through carefully selected details and statements in fiction, essays and especially interviews, Wallace crafts a literary and public persona that is very much at odds with (or a heavily curated version of) his actual life. Much of the backlash against Wallace and the various debates over whether he ought to be studied, taught, respected or outright canceled stem from the disconnect between the biography presented to his readership and the actual human who has emerged in subsequent biographies, memoirs, testimonials, archives and tweets that have made writing about Wallace a cottage industry in publishing.

As much as these paratexts may appear to carry more authority as more accurate depictions of the “real” Wallace, it is important to examine how these accounts are themselves constructed versions of Wallace grappling with Wallace’s (and at times the author’s own) place in a rapidly shifting literary and media culture. Discussion of the many constructed biographies of David Foster Wallace, including the likes of D. T. Max, David Lipsky, Mary Karr, Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides and more, would show how much literary culture has changed in the decade since his death and show how much David Foster Wallace is a distinct product of his own time and place. Wallace and Franzen may have believed that writers such as Pynchon and DeLillo had an easier, less public literary life than they did because “they made their bones in a different time,” but the past decade has shown that Wallace made his bones in a different time as well, to the extent that he would not have been able to craft such a persona free from public scrutiny (or the truth) today. In this regard, Wallace may truly be the last of his kind, part of an extinct breed: the last white male writer of the twentieth century, the greatest, male-est narcissist.

Chapter 7 deals with the resurgence of the traditional conversational mode in Neil Bartlett’s twenty-first-century novel, Skin Lane, which, associated with a most unique use of generic ‘you’, favours strategic empathy for a certain Mr F, suffering from repressed desire for a young man. It shows how the technique can be exploited as a pragmatic possibility to reach the reader’s attention anew. Although approached inParts I and II, this chapter more thoroughly investigates the notion of strategic empathy (drawing from specialists on the matter in literary studies and in socio-cognition research), as Bartlett subtly but strongly guides our ethical reaction (in the manner of Fielding) and brings us to align with the second-person pronoun (in the manner of Brontë).

This chapter offers a a brief survey of Mailer’s ongoing artistic responses and reactions to the postmodern period. Mailer is indebted to his Modernist predecessors but also experiments with perspective and structure in a way that aligns him more closely with definitions of Postmodernism. While this is most evident in his avant-garde films, it is also apparent in the self-referential nature and thematic focus of his nonfiction, as well as in his preoccupation with notions of metamorphosis.

The Epilogue reads Steinbeck’s episodic novel Cannery Row as an encapsulation of Steinbeck’s previous career. Cannery Row is a difficult novel to characterize, and hence it embodies the problem of how to read Steinbeck that we have encountered throughout. Steinbeck’s ambivalence over gender and race jostles with his desire to be a big-picture thinker contemplating the nature of human happiness. The episodic structure embodies the philosophy of the book, again making us realize how Steinbeck is a highly experimental writer whose career represents a series of aesthetic transformations in an ongoing frustration with the novel as a genre.

Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath is a notoriously ambivalent book, seeming at once politically radical and conservative in its social vision. Rather than dismissing these contradictions, this chapter examines the work performed by literary vagueness as it relates to a crucial concept that runs through Steinbeck’s writing: the process of emergence, the formation of wholes from component parts, which we see in analyses of Steinbeck’s construction of character, his slow descriptions of people and things, and his metafictional self-consciousness of the act of writing. Turning to the social philosophy of the novel, the chapter relates its faltering quality of thought--its failed attempt to articulate its ideas--to a developing understanding of the public sphere defined by false opinions and vulnerable to propaganda. The novel’s vagueness, in which ideas are always emerging but never fully forming, explains the book’s appeal to different political viewpoints. The novel’s partial self-understanding also explains Steinbeck’s failure to imagine nonwhite laborers in the California fields, as well as the jarring quality of the book’s final scene, whose power to imagine a public relationship between strangers depends on its provocative incompletion.

An overview of Steinbeck’s critical reputation that reasseses negative claims that Steinbeck is a middlebrow writer whose work is marked by unself-conscious nostalgia and sentimentalism. Turning to examples from The Grapes of Wrath and The Long Valley, the introduction argues that Steinbeck is a complex, varied, and experimental writer whose work is marked by metafiction and provocative contradiction that make it capable of unpacking and critically reexamining the very “faults” of which it is accused. Against claims that Steinbeck’s value lies in the past, I outline the many ways that his work is of urgent relevance today.

Chiefly focusing on Swift’s Cowleyan odes and epistles of the 1690s, this chapter demonstrates the author’s early rejection of conventional imitation in favour of a spontaneous form of appropriative writing. Railing against the accumulated habits of his seventeenth-century forebears, Swift repeatedly reveals in the early poems his own thwarted attempts to reinvent poetry for an unheroic age. Temporarily discarding the panegyric mode at the end of the decade, Swift found a new metafictional style that challenged the very medium of poetry. How can we adequately describe whispering or smells? If a table-book could talk would it have anything valuable to say? What would the petition of a barely literate waiting woman sound like? What happens if an overconfident member of your circle finishes one of your unfinishable ballads?

After his return to Ireland, Swift mixed with brash younger clerics such as Thomas Sheridan and Patrick Delany. Daniel Jackson’s large nose proved to be the unlikely source of profound ekphrastic pieces written by the group. Jovial bagatelles aside, ‘To Mr Delany’ displays a mid-career poet querying his craft. In ‘The Progress of Poetry’ urban hacks and farmer’s geese alike have grown fat and shrill. ‘Advice to the Grub-Street Verse-Writers’ ironically advises how modern hacks might trick a real poet – Pope – into writing original works into the margins of their books. Swift continued to rework British and Irish georgic and pastoral poetry with extraordinary inventiveness in the 1720s, whether in drolly dreary hospitality poems or pseudo-prophecy verses in the voice of St Patrick himself. Swift found new ways to insult his friends, including his hostess Lady Anne Acheson (‘The Journal of a Modern Lady’, ‘Death and Daphne’) and Matthew Pilkington (‘Directions for a Birth-Day Song’), as well as emerging poets for whom he had little taste. Such insults were couched within the unlikely genres with which he engaged, from the Ovidian courtship tale to the royal ode.

The accretion of Anglo-Irish identity around the symbolic locus of the ‘Big House’ is in many respects a distraction from any socio-economic reality, yet this tradition remains compelling within an Irish literary narrative. This chapter considers the deployment of the genre in relation to the work of Elizabeth Bowen, as it eventually becomes used as a motif through which to explore themes that could scarcely have been thought of when the original Ascendancy homes were built. It queries the accepted relationship between literary setting and social caste, and outlines fresh critical parameters for this recurrent idiom. Initially reviewing works such as Aidan Higgins’s Langrishe, Go Down, published in 1966, J. G. Farrell’s Troubles (1970) and John Banville’s Birchwood (1973), the first part of the chapter argues that these writers reinvigorated Big House fiction through stylish interventions in language and a thematic turn towards metafiction. It then discusses how in the 1970s, under the impact of revisionism, events in the North and the growth of feminism, Jennifer Johnston and Caroline Blackwood reinvented the Big House narrative of Anglo-Irish decline, subverting and parodying the conventions of a genre that until then had seemed stable and familiar.

McEwan’s novels can be understood as stepping stones in a prolonged enquiry into the narrative formation of masculinities. From his earliest stories through to Nutshell the performance of male roles and the unreliability of gender demarcations are the subject of a metafictional process. Instabilities of genre echo and play out instabilities of gender. Joining in arguments which propose the constructed nature of gender, McEwan de-centres and re-maps conventional narratives of male development and triumph, overtly in The Child in Time, persistently, if less obviously, elsewhere. Recognized tropes of male progression towards mastery (competition, ordeal, violent confrontation) are tested against the promise and potential calamities of forms of play involving regression, or dressing up. Representation, relentlessly pursuing its subjects, merges into its sinister other – harassment and stalking. So narrative shades into forms of obsession, and such obsessions point back to the formation of damaged male subjectivities and yearning for patriarchal power.

Ian McEwan claimed in 1978 that the ‘artifice of fiction can be taken for granted’, implying that the avant-garde experimentalism of the postwar era had run its course and that, going forward, writers ought not to fall into the trap of producing ‘self-enclosed “fictions”’ about the nature of fictionality. This chapter examines the ways in which this early stance changed quite considerably over time, as McEwan evolved into a socially engaged novelist of ideas who also uses fiction to deliberate in explicitly self-conscious terms on the history and ethical valences of literary form. Realism and innovation have never been opposed in his work, just as his fiction has inhabited only to refurbish numerous genre models – among them, espionage, the psychological thriller, period romance and topical satire. Lodestones for this chapter will include The Child in Time, Atonement, Saturday and Nutshell.

Ian McEwan’s post-realism is part of a marked aesthetic shift that began in the last decades of the twentieth century and continues into the twenty-first. His novels, with their attention to close description and dependence on context as well as a qualified sense that language can capture inner and outer worlds, are part of a turn to the kinds of realism characteristic of the long nineteenth century. The essay argues the turn is transformative rather than nostalgic because, like so many of his contemporaries, McEwan responds to contemporary socio-political crises by means of postmodern strategies that include parody, irony, hybridity and metafiction. Three mid-career novels that loosely share the geopolitical context of World War II and the Cold War illustrate the argument: The Innocent, Black Dogs and Atonement. Postmodern technique and novelistic realism together provide a vehicle for McEwan’s long-standing exploration of human violence across both public and private spheres.