Postmodernism’s ‘end’ is a complex and contentious topic. Yet, one overarching consensus emerges: the postmodern has been surpassed. This book poses a thought experiment challenging this position – what if postmodernism persists within the twenty-first century? Rather than designate a new epoch or coherent movement, this book interrogates the fragmented, contradictory, and counterintuitive endurance of postmodern aesthetics within post-Cold War America. An alternative use of postmodern aesthetics becomes possible when they are decoupled from their twentieth-century historical location. Collectively, these repetitions posit a postmodern continuum, contrasting the widely called-for succession of postmodernism via this decoupling. When postmodern aesthetics are no longer unconsciously repeated within their cultural moment, this emergent shift within a period ‘after’ postmodernism presents an alternative historical positioning and use. After their cultural vanguard, postmodern aesthetics become a confrontation of the chaotic realism of an inescapable post-Cold War capitalism, tapping into this cultural zeitgeist through literature.

This forward-thinking volume draws on new developments in philosophy including speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, the new materialisms, posthumanism, analytic philosophy of language and metaphysics, and ecophilosophy alongside close readings of a range of texts from the literary canon.

Scholars have argued that postmodernism is dead and that we are entering into a new era that some have labelled altermodernism, digimodernism, performatism, and post-postmodernism. This book expands on the nascent scholarship of post-postmodernism to highlight how dress, fashion, and appearance are reflections of this new age. The volume starts with a discussion of fashion, subjectivity, and time and an analysis of temporality, technology, and fashion in post-postmodern times. Later chapters analyse the work of design houses and mass producers such as Vetements, Gucci, and Uniqlo whose products align with post-postmodern aesthetics, hyperconsumption, and hypermodern branding. The book looks at diverse geographic and identity markers by discussing post-postmodernism and the religio-politico-cultural questions in South Asian Muslim fashion, image and identity presentation in queer social networking apps, and by exploring fashion designer Tom Ford's output as a movie director. Two chapters discuss the post-postmodern fashion exhibition with analyses of recent exhibitions and an in-depth look at the work of exhibition maker Judith Clark. The final chapter is written by members of The Rational Dress Society, a counter-fashion collective that makes JUMPSUIT, an experimental garment to replace all clothes. Fashion, Dress, and Post-postmodernism is a companion to research on relationships between post-postmodernism, fashion, and dress, and the go-to resource for researchers and students interested in these areas.

The book offers a collection of papers that draw on contemporary developments in cultural studies in their discussions of postmillennial trends in works of Anglophone literature and media. The first section of the book, “Addressing the Theories of a New Cultural Paradigm”, comprises ten essays that present, respectively, performatist, metamodernist, digimodernist, and hypomodernist readings of selected texts in order to test the usefulness of recent theories in explorations of the new paradigm in literary, media and food studies. The papers cover a wide variety of genres, including the novel, the film, the documentary, the cookbook, the food magazine, and the food commercial, and present a number of themes which shed light on the nature of the new paradigm. The second part of the volume, “Mapping the Dynamics of a New Sensibility”, offers a wider perspective and presents seven papers that search for evidence of a new sensibility in selected examples of postmillennial texts. These contributions move beyond the frameworks of the theories explored in the first part in order to offer new perspectives in the contributors’ respective fields of interest.

This book explores the complex interrelationship between fact and fiction in narratives of the twenty-first century. Current cultural theory observes a cultural shift away from postmodernism to new forms of expression. Rather than a radical break from the postmodern, however, postmodernist techniques are repurposed to express a new sincerity, a purposeful self-reflexivity, a contemporary sense of togetherness and an associated commitment to reality. In what the editors consider to be one manifestation of this general tendency, this book explores the ways in which contemporary texts across different media play with the boundary between fact and fiction. This includes the examination of novels, autobiography, autofiction, film, television, mockumentary, digital fiction, advertising campaigns and media hoaxes. The chapters engage with theories of what comes after postmodernism and analyse the narratological, stylistic and/or semiotic devices on which such texts rely. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.

Twenty-first century fashion practice has become increasingly borderless and diverse in the digital era, calling into question the very boundaries that define fashion in the Western cultural context. Borderless Fashion Practice: Contemporary Fashion in the Metamodern Age principally engages the work of four fashion designers -- Virgil Abloh, Aitor Throup, Iris Van Herpen, and Eckhaus Latta -- whose work intersects with other creative disciplines such as art, technology, science, architecture, and graphic design. They do their work in what Vanessa Gerrie calls the metamodern age -- the time and place where the polarization between the modern and the postmodern collapses. Used as a framework to understand the current Western cultural zeitgeist, Gerrie's exploration of the work of contemporary practitioners and theorists finds blurred borders and seeks to blur them further, to the point of erasure.

This handbook brings together the most current and hotly debated topics in studies about images today. In the first part, the book gives readers an historical overview and basic diacronical explanation of the term image, including the ways it has been used in different periods throughout history. In the second part, the fundamental concepts that have to be mastered should one wish to enter into the emerging field of Image Studies are explained. In the third part, readers will find analysis of the most common subjects and topics pertaining to images. In the fourth part, the book explains how existing disciplines relate to Image Studies and how this new scholarly field may be constructed using both old and new approaches and insights. The fifth chapter is dedicated to contemporary thinkers and is the first time that theses of the most prominent scholars of Image Studies are critically analyzed and presented in one place.

The title of this book, Derivative Lives, alludes to the challenge of finding one's way within the contemporary market of virtually limitless information and claims to veracity. Amid this profusion of options, it is easy to feel lost in spaces of uncertainty where biographical truth teeters between the real and the imaginative. The title thus also points to the prolific market of biographical novels that openly and intentionally play in the speculative space between the real and the fictional. Drawing on theories of risk and uncertainty, Derivative Lives considers the surge in biofiction in Spain and globally, relating literary expression to concepts such as circumstantiality, derivatives, speculation, and game studies.

The volume explores the various intersections and interconnections of the self and popular music in fiction; it examines questions of musical taste and identity construction across decades, spaces, social groups, and cultural contexts, covering a wide range of literary and musical genres.

This book brings together a model of time and a model of language to generate a new model of narrative, where different stories with different temporalities and non-chronological modes of sequence can tell of different worlds of human – and non-human – experience, woven together (the ‘texture of time’) in the one narrative. The work of Gerald Edelman on consciousness, J.T. Fraser on time, and M.A.K. Halliday on language is introduced; the categories of systemic functional linguistics are used for detailed analysis of English narrative texts from different literary periods. A summary chapter gives an overview of previous narrative studies and theories, with extensive references. Chapters on ‘temporalization’ and ‘spatialization’ of language contrast the importance of time in narrative texts with the effect of ‘grammatical metaphor’, as described by M.A.K. Halliday, for scientific discourse. Chapters on prose fiction, poetry and the texts of digital culture chart changes in the ‘texture of time’ with changes in the social context: ‘narrative as social semiotic’.