Postmodernism in Selected Contemporary British Novels

Abstract

This article critically examines the continuing influence of postmodernism on contemporary British fiction through an analysis of selected novels by Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson, and Peter Ackroyd. It investigates how these writers employ postmodern strategies—fragmentation, metafiction, magic realism, non-linear narrative, and intertextuality—to interrogate the constructed nature of history, identity, and reality in a globalized, plural world. Drawing on postmodern literary theory, the study analyses how these texts foreground uncertainty, ambiguity, and cultural fragmentation as defining conditions of late modernity. Barnes’s England, England satirizes the commodification of national identity through the hyperreal reconstruction of Britain’s past; Rushdie’s Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights fuses myth and history to question the binaries of reason and faith; Winterson’s The Stone Gods reconfigures gender and environmental consciousness through a cyclical, non-linear narrative; and Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde exemplifies historiographic metafiction to expose the instability of historical truth. The article concludes that postmodernism remains a vital critical framework for understanding how contemporary British fiction reimagines the relationship among culture, identity, and narrative in the twenty-first century, offering alternative epistemologies for an increasingly fragmented and interconnected world.