Twenty-first century literary representations of black British children: exceeding the limits of realism

This thesis focuses on narratives published in the twenty-first century that are set in England and
describe the everyday lives of black British children. All the books included are based on true
stories, either from the authors’ childhoods (The Icarus Girl, 26a, My Name Is Why and Forever
and Ever Amen) or those of other people (Pigeon English and Hello Mum); yet these narratives
do not fully commit to realism, remaining both symbolic and sometimes mythical. Hence, a new
approach is required to examine these texts in response to national and global trends in writing
that eschew the binary of realism and modernism. After exploring these national and global
trends, I argue that the works this thesis examines are representative of the genre of modernist
realism. This term, introduced by Fredric Jameson, describes a literary style that employs realism
but then subverts it through the integration of modernist elements. These texts destabilise
conventional categorisation by incorporating mythic and symbolic elements that question the
reality portrayed within the works and their contexts, further blurring the lines between realism
and modernism. I examine black British writing as an unstable category, changed and moulded
by diverse forces that are personal, cultural, political and historical. I therefore combine different
methodologies in examining the included texts, such as psychoanalysis and sociocultural and
spatial analyses. My argument is that these texts expand British realism to include their
characters’ transnational inheritances and, to use the terminology of Julia Kristeva, show their
abject positions in Britain.