Metaperspectives in Contemporary Literary Fiction

Metaperspectives in Contemporary Literary Fiction offers a literary-linguistic investigation of hypothesis and the metaperspective within contemporary Booker Prize-winning novels. This highly innovative book introduces a new concept in the field of stylistics , but it also explores it through analyses of highly relevant concepts and areas of stylistic study. Adam applies the concept of the metaperspective, centring on the thoughts of characters about other characters' views of them, to contemporary works of literary fiction and aligns it with existing stylistic and narratological approaches to narrative point of view. Four recent winners of the Booker Prize – The Testaments (Margaret Atwood, 2019); Milkman (Anna Burns, 2018); A Brief History of Seven Killings (Marlon James, 2014); Lincoln in the Bardo (George Saunders, 2017) – figure as case-study novels. Each novel is tied to a specific iteration of the metaperspective, labelled respectively as the discourse-architectural metaperspective, the communal metaperspective, the racialised metaperspective, and the literalised metaperspective.