NEO-MODERNISM AND METAMODERNISM: THE RETURN OF FORMAL EXPERIMENTATION IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY BRITISH FICTION

Abstract

Contemporary British fiction exhibits a remarkable revival of modernist experimental techniques, prompting scholarly debates about whether this represents neo-modernism, metamodernism, or an entirely new aesthetic formation. This research examines how twenty-first-century British writers, including A.Smith, T.McCarthy, Z. Smith, D. Mitchell, and E. McBride, employ fragmentation, stream-of-consciousness, metafiction, and temporal dislocation – formal strategies associated with canonical modernism – while engaging distinctively contemporary concerns, including digital culture, globalisation, climate crisis, and post-truth epistemology. Through close analysis of representative novels published 2000 – 2025, this study identifies both continuities with historical modernism and significant departures that distinguish contemporary experimentation. The research demonstrates that while neo-modernist writers revive modernist techniques, they do so selfconsciously, with an ironic awareness unavailable to the original modernists, creating palimpsestic texts that simultaneously invoke and distance themselves from modernist precedents. This doubled relationship – reverence and critique, inheritance and innovation – characterises what theorists term metamodernism: an oscillation between modernist formal rigour and postmodernist irony that refuses to settle into either position definitively. By analysing how formal experimentation serves contemporary political and ethical commitments rather than aesthetic autonomy for its own sake, this analysis contributes to emerging scholarship on twenty-first-century literary form while challenging narratives that position postmodernism as the definitive endpoint of experimental fiction.