Metaperspectives in Contemporary Literary Fiction : A Stylistic Approach

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. These varieties of the metaperspective are linked to typical linguistic indices and thematic preoccupations within each of the novels under analysis. Discussions are further supported by consideration of other contemporary, Booker Prize-winning works. This original study of an entirely new concept within the disciplines of stylistics and narratology has enormous potential and value for the understanding of literary texts. The practical stylistic analyses are well grounded in existing scholarship, making use of concepts like empathy, point of view and reader positioning, all of which are current and important approaches to narrative texts.