Metacritical fictions: Post-war literature meets academic culture (A. S. Byatt, Iris Murdoch, Salman Rushdie, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf)

The world of contemporary literary-academic culture has been, and continues to be, strongly impacted by changes in perspective associated with the advent of postmodern thought. This study begins with an exploration of post-World War II metacritical inquiry, which, with rising urgency, addresses the depth and breadth of concerns associated with the study of literature, and therefore with literary criticism and theory, not only as isolated within departments of English, but also as implicated in the complex politics of the university and of public image. This initial exploration provides context for the project's overall focus: a study of the ways in which the novels of certain post-War writers in England reflect and respond to contemporary metacritical concerns. My inquiry departs from the idea of a metacritical presence of postmodernism in such fiction, and develops through an examination of fictional texts suggestive of the close interaction and reciprocal influence of literature and theory since World War II.; I establish a spectrum of fiction with overt and/or covert metacritical implications from roots in the modernist fictions of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, to contemporary novels by A. S. Byatt, Iris Murdoch, and Salman Rushdie. In effect, their fictional stories tell corollary critical stories which explore the inextricable connections between literature and the critical enterprise it inspires, and encompass a range of responses to the increasing complexities of interpreting and understanding literature in contemporary culture. I argue that metacritical fictions go beyond being a literary trend to comprising part of a complex web of interrelations with implications reaching far beyond the boundaries of the page or the classroom. Such novels promote the need for critical comfort within a space of competing interpretive possibilities. I ultimately contend that this critical awareness and flexibility not only allows a variety of voices to be heard within a given text, but also is crucial to the survival of literature as a discipline in the face of changing social and cultural needs.