To write of ‘postmodernism’ is both to skate on thin ice and to tread familiar ground. Almost every piece of scholarship that uses this classification must begin, by convention it seems, with a lengthy tract on what precisely is meant by ‘the postmodern’. It is precarious ‘thin ice’ because these definitions are not always aligned with one another and are sometimes delicate. For instance, many of the tropes that one might call ‘postmodern’ and to which I will shortly turn are clearly exhibited in Romantic-era writing or in the epic of Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). Such definitional work is ‘familiar ground’, though, because the procedure has become so routinised as to appear mundane.

The most common interpretation of the conjunction ‘and’ in the phrase ‘fiction and film’ is to silently convert it into a preposition; to think of adaptation of novels and short stories into film and TV. Given how many books have served as source texts for visual media, this is hardly surprising. The Russian director Sergei Eisenstein also noted that many of the narrative strategies of nineteenth-century popular novelists had inspired innovative directors such as D. W. Griffith or King Vidor in their development of cinematic techniques such as the close-up, the dissolve, the superimposed shot or montage. In turn, modernist writers learnt from cinematography: think of the scene from Mrs Dalloway (1925) in which the point of view shifts back and forth between the advertising slogan being puffed into the sky by an aeroplane and different individuals on the ground: this is classic intercutting.

In 1983, the journal Granta released its first ‘best of’ issue, featuring the twenty most promising British novelists under the age of 40. The Granta 7 roster proved auspicious and laid the groundwork for the careers of some of the most successful British novelists of the late twentieth century. Based on a campaign run by the Book Marketing Council, the issue ran over 300 pages and included the work of such figures as Salman Rushdie, Pat Barker, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Graham Swift and Julian Barnes. From Thatcherism to the expansion of British identity, and from gender inequality to newly flexible models of history, the issue’s themes announced the main literary and cultural preoccupations of the decade.

In 1980 I did not have a computer. Neither did anyone else I knew. E- as a prefix to anything such as e-passports was not in use then; in 2017 the capture of biodata in many different forms such as iris recognition has made e-passports a norm. Similarly, the ability to manipulate biodata and bio materials through biotechnological innovation, for instance in the context of fertility, has revolutionised ideas of kinship and can, in 2017, accommodate notions of multiple biological parents to a single child. The driverless car is being tested. Paro, the robot seal, is being used to comfort the elderly as robot carers for the elderly are being developed. Technology-enhanced surveillance is becoming ever more sophisticated, with the state and corporations submitting to and exploiting the self-learning algorithms of artificial intelligence systems that pervade the everyday.

Form is one of the more slippery concepts in literary criticism: elusive of definition, unavoidable in practice. Even the most doctrinaire of political critics, questioned as to why they are writing about novels to expose economic injustice, rather than about the more obvious evidence of income distribution, must justify their choice, in the end, by claiming there is something distinct about the novel as a form that offers insights unavailable elsewhere. That distinction has often been a dubious one. In a claim that set the tone for attitudes towards form at the beginning of the period covered by this Companion, Fredric Jameson argued that form named a special kind of deception: ‘the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal “solutions” to unresolvable social contradictions’. This inverted the tradition, beginning with Kant and Schiller, of using form to name what distinguished literature in a positive sense from other uses of language. This use of form was dubious in its own way, acquiring so many contradictory meanings that it became, as Angela Leighton observes, ‘a noun lying in wait of its object’. Yet whether the target of censure or praise, literary critics have never strayed far from using form to talk about the relationship between what Raymond Williams identified as two persistent but different meanings: a ‘visible and outward shape’ and an ‘essential shaping principle’. The attempt to talk about both at once is what makes the concept of fictional form so slippery. In trying to analyse as tangible that which can only be virtual, form must always evade our grasp. You can’t point to linear causality, just as you can’t touch first-person narration, but these are the shapes and shaping principles we use form to name. Form is an attempt to talk about what enables language to mean by imagining something tangible and material lying between words and their referents, be they themselves real or imaginary.

Literary critics face particular obstacles in thinking about and interpreting the novels with which they share a period. As Robert Eaglestone has noted, because the archive from which literary critics of the contemporary choose is constantly expanding, because we lack the perspective which retrospect brings, our criteria of selection tend to be based on subjects we have already chosen: ‘we choose the themes … and then find books that explore these themes’. However, it is possible to see that the selection of themes and the subsequent claims made have reached something of a critical consensus in contemporary literary studies. For many critics, the contemporary novel has rejected a postmodern playfulness that draws attention to textuality and exhibits a scepticism about the nature of representation. Instead, it attempts to reattach itself to what is usually called ‘the real’ and a new seriousness in narrowing the gap between fictional representation and the world around it. Even those critics who see a continuation of some of the claims of postmodernist thought argue that these are being forced into relation with a more recent desire for the ‘real’. For Daniel Lea, the contemporary novel is involved in a ‘striving to marry the desire for the real with the legacy of postmodernism’s fascination with the simulacral’. These claims about a ‘return to the real’ have very often also involved a reassessment of the contemporary British novel’s engagement with the conventions of realism. For many critics, novels since 2000 have acknowledged that no easy return to a classic realism is possible. Instead they argue that what many do is challenge the ‘simple opposition’ between realism and experiment. In this chapter, I will not be suggesting that this reading of the post-millennial novel is mistaken. Writers themselves – in interviews, articles and essays – are articulating their aims and concerns in such terms. Rather, I want to suggest that parallel to a desire for a return to the ‘real’ there runs an anxious awareness of the limits of the novel in achieving such a return.

In 1983, the journal Granta released its first ‘best of’ issue, featuring the twenty most promising British novelists under the age of 40. The Granta 7 roster proved auspicious and laid the groundwork for the careers of some of the most successful British novelists of the late twentieth century. Based on a campaign run by the Book Marketing Council, the issue ran over 300 pages and included the work of such figures as Salman Rushdie, Pat Barker, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Graham Swift and Julian Barnes. From Thatcherism to the expansion of British identity, and from gender inequality to newly flexible models of history, the issue’s themes announced the main literary and cultural preoccupations of the decade.

To bring this Companion to a close is necessarily to reflect on the future, on the ways in which the historical formations that we have traced in the preceding chapters allow us to conceive, at this brief and troubled threshold of our shared present, of the time to come.

It is all too easy to forget that the 1990s were not just the decade of Cool Britannia. Tony Blair’s New Labour only took power in 1997, and the major part of the decade consisted in the slightly embarrassed hangover of a decade of Thatcherism. The 1997 Vanity Fair article that launched the ‘Cool Britannia’ label identified the eminently forgettable face of that lukewarm Britannia as ‘gray-flannel, beans-on-toast John Major!’. Major’s tenure as prime minister between 1992 and 1997 consolidated Thatcher’s break with Britain’s post-war consensus, yet failed to develop a national iconography to convert the fall-out of that rupture into a marketable national brand. This brand arrived later in the decade, when New Labour’s Third Way spun the realities of imperial decline and rampant deindustrialisation as, somehow, good things – as occasions for entrepreneurialism and a patriotic embrace of a demotic national culture. This culture was emblematised by the Britpop phenomenon, as bands like Blur and Oasis indulged in their eclectic recycling of sounds, styles and fashions from three decades of British music – looking back, but not in anger so much as in nostalgic yearning. When, in one of the iconic images of the decade, Oasis’s Noel Gallagher shook hands with Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street in July 1997, the neoliberal reorganisation of the nation that had started in the 1980s finally found its cool.

In a eulogising essay following the death of John Updike in 2009, Ian McEwan wrote: ‘American letters, deprived in recent years of its giants, Bellow and Mailer [and now Updike], is a levelled plain, with one solitary peak guarded by Roth.’ Philip Roth would go on to announce his retirement from writing in 2012 and passed away in 2018, thus eradicating the final face from McEwan’s literary Mount Rushmore. McEwan’s friends and peers, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes, similarly wrote eulogies for Updike; just as McEwan and Christopher Hitchens (another member of their literary set) had done for Saul Bellow in 2005 (‘What other American novelist’, asked Hitchens, ‘has had such a direct and startling influence on non-Americans young enough to be his children?’), while Amis and McEwan both spoke at Bellow’s memorial in New York. Amis also wrote an account of Roth’s oeuvre the year after his retirement, and followed this with an appreciation after his death, while McEwan remembered Roth on BBC Radio.

To write of ‘postmodernism’ is both to skate on thin ice and to tread familiar ground. Almost every piece of scholarship that uses this classification must begin, by convention it seems, with a lengthy tract on what precisely is meant by ‘the postmodern’. It is precarious ‘thin ice’ because these definitions are not always aligned with one another and are sometimes delicate. For instance, many of the tropes that one might call ‘postmodern’ and to which I will shortly turn are clearly exhibited in Romantic-era writing or in the epic of Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). Such definitional work is ‘familiar ground’, though, because the procedure has become so routinised as to appear mundane.

In 1980 I did not have a computer. Neither did anyone else I knew. E- as a prefix to anything such as e-passports was not in use then; in 2017 the capture of biodata in many different forms such as iris recognition has made e-passports a norm. Similarly, the ability to manipulate biodata and bio materials through biotechnological innovation, for instance in the context of fertility, has revolutionised ideas of kinship and can, in 2017, accommodate notions of multiple biological parents to a single child. The driverless car is being tested. Paro, the robot seal, is being used to comfort the elderly as robot carers for the elderly are being developed. Technology-enhanced surveillance is becoming ever more sophisticated, with the state and corporations submitting to and exploiting the self-learning algorithms of artificial intelligence systems that pervade the everyday.

In the wake of the Brexit referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union of June 2016 the idea of a specifically British cosmopolitanism has come to the fore. Yet for much of the post-Second World War period it was a less familiar term than more typically British values of ‘tolerance’ or ‘respect’ towards immigrants, refugees or citizens of other countries. The term’s original meaning, derived from Greek κοσμοπολίτης or ‘citizen of the world’, combines the Greek word κόσμος for ‘world’ and πολίτης for ‘citizen’ to suggest a political ethos that moved beyond ties to the city-state or ‘polis’ to embrace commonalities with the wider world. Its English definitions pull in contradictory directions: on the one hand, describing people or species that transcend nationality, ‘Belonging to all parts of the world; not restricted to any one country or its inhabitants’; on the other hand, describing places often viewed with suspicion, ‘Composed of people from many different countries’. In an interview in 2006, Stuart Hall captured the ambivalence surrounding the term even for its advocates. Critiquing the impact of globalisation, he argues: ‘If we don’t move towards the more open horizon of cosmopolitanism-from-below, we will find ourselves driven either to homogenization from above or to the barrier of, the war of all against all.’ Yet when his interviewer, Prina Werbner, asks him, ‘Do you feel yourself to be a cosmopolitan?’ Hall pauses uncomfortably, ‘You know you hear me hesitate every time I use the word.’ Hall’s hesitation has to do with the idea’s origins in Enlightenment philosophy and ties with colonialism which excluded non-Western subjects. But his hesitation to invoke the term is typical in a British context, to do with its rarified or elitist connotations. Yet this ambivalence and global reach, this double quality of belonging out there in the world and bringing the whole world home to challenge local loyalties or identities, has made cosmopolitanism a rich source of fictional exploration. I will argue here that despite its utopian aspirations, cosmopolitanism is frequently a disruptive force in British fiction, producing disturbing scenes, narrative doubling and conflict, as often as it represents hospitable people and spaces or imaginary alternatives to provincialism, nationalism and xenophobia.