Revenant modernisms and the recurrence of Literary History

Abstract

This essay suggests that literary production post-postmodernism has not progressed to something new, but rather has returned to quintessentially modernist anxieties and modes of expression--especially renewed faith in grand narratives. The argument draws upon and coalesces two theoretical texts to help identify what I term 'revenant modernism' as a "symbolic space" (Flatley, 2008: 32) where a sort of "secular re-enchantment" (Landy & Saler, 2009: 2) remains possible: Jonathan Flatley's Affective mapping: Melancholia and the politics of modernism (2008) and The re-enchantment of the world: Secular magic in a rational age (2009) by Joshua Landy and Michael Saler. I then examine two recent novels--Will Self's Umbrella (2012) and Eimear McBride's A girl is a half-formed thing (2014)--as evidence of this return. Along the way, I tie both of these novels back to their stated modernist influence (James Joyce's Ulysses [1993]) in order to show how Self and McBride's fiction borrows from Joyce's particular brand of postcolonial modernism.