| Summary: | The thesis focuses on literary-engagements with London and New York from 1985- present. It brings together a diverse range of literary texts and theoretical discourses on postmodernity, post-colonialism, mass culture and difference, and identifies a variety of cognate literary approaches adopted by contemporary authors in response to the more undesirable facets of late-capitalism. Postmodernity is often conceptualised negatively, critiqued for the way in which it diminishes subjectivity, authenticity, meaning, cultural and ideological efficacy, and historical continuity. The thesis challenges this theoretical perspective by showing how contemporary writing on London and New York is characterised by a recuperative agenda that seeks to ascribe these very qualities to everyday urban experience as it is lived and felt under the conditions of postmodernity. In particular, it considers the significant role played by formal experimentation, and the ways in which postmodern literary techniques, such as intertextuality and hybridity, work ironically to recover a high- modernist concern with meaning, authenticity, cultural efficacy and individual agency. The thesis identifies a millennial shift towards a ‘post-postmodern’ or ‘metamodern’ optimism and enthusiasm, and locates contemporary writing on urban space within this new context.
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