Metamodernism and metafeminist subjectivity in British women’s ‘experimental’ and innovative writing from the 1960s to 1990s

Al-Mubaddel, Arwa 2024. Metamodernism and metafeminist subjectivity in British women’s ‘experimental’ and innovative writing from the 1960s to 1990s. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

This thesis takes a postcritical revisionist and interventionist approach as it conceptualises metamodernism and metafeminist subjectivity in British women’s ‘experimental’ and innovative writing from the 1960s-1990s. Metamodernism was popularised through cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin Van den Akker’s ‘Notes on Metamodernism’ (2010) as a cultural paradigm of the early 2000s. This study, however, posits metamodernism as a cultural variant of the 1960s to 1990s through its early and current theorisations in the chosen texts of this thesis. Metafeminism, on the other hand, was introduced critically in the 1990s by Lori Saint-Martin to refer to the feminist links between Quebecan women’s unconventional writing beyond post-feminist paradigms, and further developed by Marie Carrière in 2020 to account for contemporary self-reflexive, multi-directional and ambivalent feminisms. I argue for a metamodern and metafeminist literary mode that is characterised by oscillatory dynamics across experimental forms and representations of gender, historicity, affect, and relationality. I posit it as a later twentieth-century cultural and literary sensibility that creates new interpretative openings for select canonical and lesser known British women’s ‘experimental’ literary works of the period. My study aims to offer pertinent metamodern and metafeminist conceptualisations regarding poetics, aesthetics, and representations of female and ‘feminine’ subjectivity in Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Quin’s Passages (1969), Brophy’s In Transit: An Heroi-Cyclic Novel (1969), Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977), Kay’s The Adoption Papers (1991), and Evaristo’s Lara (1997:2009). The structure of this thesis enacts its own oscillatory dynamic as chapters are coupled according to formalistic features and representations of subjectivity to unfold the texts’ conceptual terrains. This postcritical framework enables readers to engage with the simultaneous deconstructionist-reconstructionist impulses embedded within these works. By fostering innovative meta-reading practices, this thesis advocates for an attentiveness to the multifaceted complexities of women’s experimental writing, creating space for a literary mode that circumvents traditional dichotomies such as modern/postmodern, realist/experimental, and problematises the postcolonial notion of hybridity.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Funders:	Saudi Arabian Cultural Bureau
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	3 April 2025
Last Modified:	03 Apr 2025 14:03
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/177269

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