Arwa Al-Mubaddel

(she/her)

AFHEA BA HONS MA (Dist) AMInsLM

Research

Thesis

Metamodernism and Metafeminist Subjectivity in British Women's ‘Experimental’ and Innovative Writing from the 1960s-1990s: Oscillation, Historicity, Affect, and Relationality

(posted 20 February 2024; updated 02 July 2024)

My study is both revisionist and interventionist as it proposes a new literary and cultural genre development and conceptualises a new configuration of female subjectivity in British women’s ‘experimental’ and innovative writing from the 1960s-1990s through a metamodern and metafeminist critical framework. 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. My thesis, 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 new writing beyond post-feminist paradigms. I adopt and negotiate metafeminism through a new reading of post-structuralist theories of feminism, as well as radical, intersectional, and decolonial feminisms from the 1960s to 1990s. This thesis therefore draws a link between metamodernism and metafeminism by postulating metafeminism as a metamodern model of feminism. This study is the first to extend critical metafeminism beyond its Canadian context and through a metamodern model.

My thesis further argues that metamodernism developed as early as the second half of the twentieth century as a cultural and literary sensibility alongside an ambivalent feminism that complicates aesthetic and authorial attitudes towards ‘second-wave’ and ‘third-wave’ feminism in selected works by Doris Lessing, Ann Quin, Brigid Brophy, Angela Carter, Jackie Kay, and Bernardine Evaristo. I conceptualise the formal poetics of 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: a Family Like Water (1997) as demonstrated through aesthetic form and representations of female subjectivity in these texts. My thesis further offers a revisionist reading of French feminism, radical and intersectional feminisms, as well as later twentieth-century deconstructive approaches by conceptualising a metamodern metafeminist understanding of oscillation, historicity, affect, and relationality. In doing so, it contests essentialist understandings of the feminine/feminist representations of female subjectivity in British women’s ‘experimental’ and innovative writing from the 1960s to 1990s. 

I position my study within the emerging fields of metamodernism and metafeminism alongside renewed critical interest in the understudied field of British women’s ‘experimental’ and innovative writing. It introduces the first in-depth study of metamodernism and metafeminism, and metamodernism within the context of  the twentieth century, seeking to offer original conceptualisations for both by positing their distinct development through British women’s ‘experimental’ and innovative writing. The interdisciplinary nature of this study further contributes to theories of female/feminine subjectivity, feminist theory, ‘black’ British literature, literary genre studies, twentieth-century critical and cultural critique, experimental writing, and Modern & Contemporary literature and culture.

Funding sources

Funded by the Saudi Cultural Bureau London/ KSA Ministry of Education