ABSTRACT
‘Are we ready for a new generation of experimental fiction?’ asked literary critic and novelist Lee Rourke in 2008 (Rourke 2008). During the rash of fin-de-siècle literary stock-taking that appeared during the first decade of the new millennium, the answer seemed to be, resoundingly: no. The symbolic potency of the turn of a new century, along with the transformative events of its early years – 9/11 (which came to signal the belated and catastrophic point of entry into the new era), the subsequent War on Terror, the 2008 financial crash and its aftermath – all seemed to call for new representational strategies capable of articulating a new and radically different kind of real. The increasing awareness that the rise of digital cultures may well signal a new and distinct phase of late modernity and a growing recognition of the waning of the postmodern project also seemed to demand novelistic innovations that might attest to the continuing relevance of an ancient and venerable tradition. But as the forms and functions of twenty-first-century fiction and the role of the writer were speculated upon, the outlook for experiment amongst what was only then beginning to be periodised as ‘post-millennial fiction’ was not good.
