The Coda traces fashion’s permeation of the novel genre into our contemporary moment, and contends that the novel’s innovative engagement with digital technology and social media over the past decade has roots firmly in the nineteenth century. Historicizing the advent of Twitter-fiction, the Coda proposes that we recognize in contemporary fiction’s experiments with seriality and hypercurrency an upcycling of narrative forms developed in analogous moments of profound change in the nineteenth century. Twitter-fiction explores the relation of parts and wholes, of individuals and collectivities, in an historical age when digital mediation enables new configurations of publicness, when virtual self-expression is the medium less of identity than main character energy, and when the timeframe of the quotidian has become an inadequate measure of the experience of historical change. The Coda argues that contemporary writers who immerse their fiction in the media and sensibilities of the moment may risk radical obsolescence, but that is precisely the point: they aim to conceptualize the temporality and textures of the immediate present.

This chapter engages with questions around the possibilities and limitations of the novel and narrative in the Anthropocene. It addresses these challenges by drawing on and extending work in econarratology, and applying it to three novels in which floods depict the impact of climate change. In navigating the spatial, temporal and representational challenges of imagining climate crisis, these novels achieve a switching back and forth between the reader's actual world and the textual world. It is this back and forth, and the realisation that results from it, that is central to the role that the novel as a genre might play in depicting the Anthropocene.

This chapter identifies and analyses some of the major trends of the millennial novel in French from the huge and diverse corpus on offer: ‘reality, not realism’, ‘history, but for the present’, ‘fantasy and the ludic’, ‘language, but not for language’s sake’. The titles signal how these millennial versions of trends recognisable from past centuries have taken on nuances that clearly distinguish them from their predecessors. The millennial ‘realist’ novel stages authentic, non-fictional voices within a fictional frame, using the fictional as a means of investigation into reality; the millennial historical novel takes a présentiste (Hartog) approach to history, often using the present tense to bring even the distant past into the realm of the present. The millennial version of the fantastical and ludic novel benefits from the readers’ greater awareness of the novel as a created object, an awareness which is also exploited by writers of more popular literature. So too do the novelists who experiment with language, producing works that depend on the reader’s acceptance of it as belonging to a fictional universe. The chapter concludes that a readership trained in the art of novel-reading is vital to the success of all of these trends.

This chapter suggests that Ian McEwan’s vexed relationship with British modernism can be resolved by understanding modernism as an aesthetic and political resource that his novels adapt to new conditions of life in the twenty-first century. Looking at several of the novels with the obvious connections to modernist literature – Atonement, Saturday, Solar and The Children Act – this chapter explores the ways McEwan engages with and updates three key modernist ideals: the aesthetics of transgression and rupture; the view of human nature; and modernism’s claims for the relevance of the literary. Common to each of these ‘updates’ is a shedding of the grandiose claims of modernism in favour of more modest and minor concepts of literary value better attuned to the indirect and limited ways that literature operates today.