The Metamodern Moment: Post-Postmodernism and its Effect on Contemporary, Gothic, and Metafictional Literatures

In 2002, Linda Hutcheon asked literary critics to recognise that the postmodern, the dominant cultural and intellectual ideology of the past half-century, had passed and subsequently invited future researchers to discover, delineate, and name this new epoch. This thesis examines the developments in western culture and the arts in the years since this declaration, exploring the collection of new ideological paradigms that have emerged in the ‘post-postmodern’ era, such as Alan Kirby’s ‘Digimodernism,’ Raoul Eshelman’s ‘Performatism,’ or Jeffrey Nealon’s ‘Post-Postmodernism.’ As part of this analysis of this wide spectrum of the new ‘-isms’ that have risen to claim the title of the postmodern successor, this thesis identifies Timotheus Vermeullen and Robin van den Akker’s metamodernism as the most likely candidate for the prime-moniker of the age. Evidence of the metamodern is found in several factors of western contemporary society, though this thesis focuses specifically on the application of metamodern techniques and ideologies in literature, and in particular the use of myth, sincerity, and explorations of a New Romantic attitude in contemporary literary fiction. The metamodern additionally finds a suitable site for exploration within the Gothic genre, which is also explored with the aim of demonstrating the suitability of the genre to support metamodern experimentation, with several contemporary Gothic examples analysed as evidence. Finally, the often postmodern-aligned mode of metafiction is analysed from a 2018 post-postmodern standpoint, answering the questions of how the mode will survive in a society actively striving to abandon the postmodern, and what value it would give to further literary production should it survive.