The growing interdependence between humans and machines has been a focal point in recent posthuman studies: scholars such as Rosi Braidotti (Posthuman Knowledge, 2019) have underlined the encroachment of technology on human beings and its subsequent blurring of the boundaries between the two. This is reflected in Machines Like Me, in which advanced forms of artificial intelligence are embodied by gendered, human-looking androids: the Adams and the Eves. the narrator’s Adam can ‘pass’ as a man thanks to its lifelike physique and behaviour—it is thus neither a human nor a machine, but a hybrid creature that can think, love, and even engage in sexual intercourse. This liminal status invites a posthuman redefinition of intimacy: what does it mean to love, and be loved by, a machine—and what does it reveal about the human self?
Although Britain had advertised a change of colonial identity with its multicultural policies, the Windrush Scandal shed light on ongoing racial and ethnic determinisms, questioning the possibility of still adhering to a shared national identity. If Sam Selvon, Caryl Phillips, Andrea Levy and Zadie Smith, members or descendants of the Windrush generation, foreground the paradoxical static nature of the multicultural transition in Britain and its dire consequences for minorities, they also seem to portray cultural unity as achievable in Moses Ascending (1975), Crossing the River (1993), Small Island (2004), White Teeth (2000) and NW (2012). This paper analyses how, through their deconstruction of the fixed nature of ‘racial purity’ as a criterion for national belonging, their appropriation of the ideals of the British realist novel to renegotiate minority selfhoods, and their showcasing of how migration revitalises British culture, these novelists point to transculturalism as a possible national way forward.
In traditional tales of human-animal transformation, the young wife’s bodily metamorphosis into a fox symbolises female cunning and betrayal. Sarah Hall acknowledges this tradition in her novella, Mrs Fox (2013) through a wealth of intertextual allusions to David Garnett’s Lady into Fox (1922) and other early twentieth-century British fictions on the same subject. The article argues that Hall invokes this topos only as a starting point for the construction of her own counter-narrative. From Hall’s postfeminist perspective (Young), the young wife’s dream of escape becomes a new materialist story of Sophia’s vibrant corporal matter (Bennett) enacting a ‘no’ to her married life and expressing the capacity to swerve from the trajectory prescribed for her by her possessive and inattentive husband. Thus, Sophia’s ‘willful’ (Ahmed) transformation into a vixen may be said to respond to an embodied urge to ‘becoming animal’ (Deleuze and Guattari) that enhances a politics of female agency and assertion and gainsays classical humanist binary oppositions such as human-animal, man-woman, nature-culture, homosexual-heterosexual, etc.
Harry Parker’s essay Hybrid Humans: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Man and Machine (2022) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Klara and the Sun (2021) both explore the question of the transition towards a posthuman state—or ontology—through the figure of the prosthesis. From non-fiction to dystopia and from prosthetic legs to prosthetic beings, both texts reflect on the ways in which the prosthesis constructs temporal, ontological and textual transitions. This article reflects on the way these various types of transition are constructed in the text as well as it addresses the question of embodiment and materiality, problematised by the figure of the prosthesis. Using Peter Boxall’s essay The Prosthetic Imagination (2024), I will ultimately show that these texts themselves are prostheses and become spaces of transition through which the readers can navigate from one world to another, thereby becoming hybrids themselves.
This article examines how The Selfless Act of Breathing by British-Congolese author JJ Bola could be read through the lens of the poetic metaphor of the atemwende (breath turn) developed by poet Paul Celan. The novel explores what is entailed by the phrase ‘I can’t breathe’ through the life of the protagonist who struggles to breathe properly in his home city of London and decides to leave for the United States where he plans to spend his savings before taking his own life. Thanks to this journey, the protagonist finds himself in a transitory space without any norms or delimitations, which allows him to explore new ways of being and envision a future where life could be breathable again. The novel can therefore be considered as a breath turn according to Paul Celan’s definition: a transitory space-time in which a transformation is operated, which is then offered to the reader for their own interpretation.
Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under questions transitions through a rewriting of the Oedipus myth, in a nonlinear structure that mirrors the ontological instability of its characters. Set on Oxford’s Isis River, it uses water’s shifting nature as a metaphor for identity and fate. Gretel, a lexicographer, is drawn toward Sarah, the abusive mother who abandoned her sixteen years earlier. Besides, the novel explores physical transitions with the story of Marcus, a transgender character who unwittingly fulfills a prophecy by an equally transgender oracle. This paper examines how geographical, ontological and narrative instability paradoxically dramatises destiny as a shapeshifting yet inevitable force: the metamorphic environment draws the characters towards their immutable fates, identity is in constant flux, and the inescapable instability of language as well as the novel’s generic fluidity qualify the illusory desire to fix meaning and to control closure.
This issue of Études britanniques contemporaines emanates from contributions to a workshop of the Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaines (SEAC) at the 2025 conference of the Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur in Toulouse. The conference revolved around the notion of transitions and gave contributors the opportunity to probe the polysemic dimensions of this concept in British literature and culture of the 20th and 21st centuries. This introduction examines how the concept of transition is deployed in a variety of fields and focuses on notions of process, passage, transformation, change and ongoing negotiation between different stages, thus contrasting with more radical images of rupture, break or revolution.
This article explores the emergence and impact of the Women’s Art History Collective (WAHC), founded in London in 1973, as part of the broader sociopolitical movements of the 1960s and 1970s in the United Kingdom. Rooted in feminist and Marxist theory, the WAHC critiqued the male-dominated narratives of art history challenging institutional structures, language, and historiography as well as the role of individuals in the perpetuation of this ‘state of affairs’. Positioned between the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) and the New Left, the collective played a key role in shaping British feminist art history and contributed to the rise of the New Art History movement. Despite its brief existence, WAHC’s work left a lasting theory, notably through the publication Old Mistresses, Woman, Art and Ideology (1981), that constitutes the legacy of the collective’s analyses and inquiries.
This article examines Yrsa Daley-Ward’s The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir (2018) as a formal and political reconfiguration of contemporary life writing. It argues that the memoir’s political force lies less in the singularity of the experiences it recounts than in the formal strategies through which those experiences are rendered perceptible. Drawing on life-writing studies, trauma studies, vulnerability studies, in/visibility studies, and decolonial criticism, the article shows how Daley-Ward places the memoir genre under strain by disrupting conventions of coherence, linearity, and stable selfhood traditionally associated with Western autobiography. Through generic hybridity, poetic fragmentation, polyphonic narration, and non-linear temporalities, The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir produces a form of dissensus in the Rancièrian sense, redistributing the sensible and making visible subjectivities historically marginalised within British cultural and literary fields. Ultimately, the article contends that Daley-Ward’s memoir enacts an ethics of attention grounded in relationality, vulnerability, and decolonial resistance.
In her introduction to D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow, Rachel Cusk claims that it ‘offers an account of how the old world became the new’. The same might be said of her 2021 novel Second Place, which reworks Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Lorenzo in Taos (1932), an account of her encounter with Lawrence in New Mexico, with Cusk transposing it instead to a marshy coast land in modern day England, and replacing the famous writer Lawrence with the narcissistic painter L. The many similarities between the older book and the new (the names Brett and Tony, Tony’s seemingly Indian roots, the car journey, the claim that L. wishes to destroy M., the role played by M’s will) all serve to underscore the idea that a transition from an old world to a new, is at play here. As well as Luhan’s memoirs, Cusk’s novel also draws on Lawrence’s ideas (on conquest, on freedom, on the eternal), imparting a particularly personal and modern spin to the narrative.
Known for her many retellings of canonical works, in Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles, Jeanette Winterson re-elaborates on what is possibly the most traditional of literary forms: myth. By speculating on how fact and fiction merge into unexpected aesthetic representations of the real, the author explores the ideological nature of myths as prompted by their contextual proximity to reality. The result, as this paper aims to demonstrate, is a text where the emotional and affective value of fiction reinstates the realist genre by raising some of the fundamental ontoepistemological questions concerning humanity today. Put differently, oscillating between the non-linearity of the fantastic and the situatedness of the real, Winterson lands on an agential form of realism, intended as the material-semiotic potential of a reverse mimesis to forsake the canon and challenge the totalizing objectivity of individualist metaphysics.
How do three novels from the 2010s perform their complex relationship with 19th-century realism and political economy? Smith’s NW (2012), Lanchester’s Capital (2012) and Coe’s Number 11 (2015) acknowledge their debt to Victorian realism and distance it at the same time: realism exists in ghostly form in the guise of palimpsests, metaphors and parodies of the condition of England as they appear in key scenes of Victorian literature. Similarly, Marx and Engels’s concepts of the labouring body, commodity fetichism and primitive accumulation inform these (post)modern narratives. The three novels also showcase more radical forms of ultra contemporary materialism including trans-corporeality and extreme commodification and dispossession. Despite the fracturing and dislocation brought to bear on the ‘bourgeois epic’ (Lukács) and the main tenets of political economy, the three novelists offer us a renewed realism that plays with what David Harvey has called a geography of hope.
Premised in material ecocriticism (Alaimo, Neimanis, Sullivan, Armiero) and environmental narratology (Caracciolo), this study focuses on Daisy Johnson’s novel Everything Under (2018) and various manifestations of fluidity in it—of water, body, identity, relationships, genre, language and narrative. Materiality is approached as impurity, distinguishing material realism from both romanticism and classical realism. Important concepts are transcorporeality and Wasteocene, stressing the porosity of vulnerable bodies, enmeshed in their material and environmentally precarious environments, and the materiality of a nonsmooth, nonlinear, experiential narrative, theorised as texturality. These are approached through the recurrent motif of the river as a connecting fabric and agent of texturality, body’s becoming, gender transformations, kinetic and olfactory textures of memory. Cartesian logocentrism is challenged with the discussion of language as affective and textured.
This article analyses Philip Kerr’s Friedrich the Great Detective (2017), which features at the intersections of historical crime fiction, biofiction, memory text and young adult novel, as representative of recent trends in the historical novel. It argues that it is particularly the genre’s recent diversity and its noteworthy political involvements that ensure its current success. The novel features a young neighbour of Erich Kästner, who, fascinated by Kästner’s hero Emil, aims to become a detective in 1930s Berlin. Against the rise of the Nazi party, Friedrich’s playful pursuit soon turns political as his friend Kästner is persecuted, and Friedrich himself is forced to join the Hitlerjugend. Thus, Philip Kerr’s historical crime story is also a bleak warning of nationalist populism. Told from Friedrich’s perspective, it illustrates how present-day historical fiction addresses past and present political wrongs and attempts to shape its readers’ historical memories to ensure a better future.
