Since its launch in 2012, C21 Literature has been a venue for thinking about contemporary writing and its place in a broader cultural context, and as the official journal of the British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS), it is the home of literary scholarship engaged with the challenging task of understanding, periodising, and historicising the present. C21 has been open access through the Open Library of the Humanities since 2016, and it proudly participates in a new, more sustainable vision of scholarly publishing.
The Century at 25 is a special issue marking the first 25 years of the 21st century. The issue collects papers that reflect on contemporary literature and on contemporary literary studies. As we read the submissions, themes began to emerge relating to crisis, chronology, technological change and information cultures. These preoccupations tend towards a vision of the present in which new information about events accrues very fast and in overwhelming volumes while at the same time giving the impression of intractability. For instance, Gerald David Naughton and Yulia Pushkarevskaya Naughton take up Lauren Berlant’s concept of ‘genre flailing’ to explain both the huge amount of energy expended on attempting to respond to the demands of current events through experimental forms, but also the feeling of that expenditure leaving us still in the same place we began. Hanne Bolze, in another context, offers an analysis of the ways that the weight of expectations that theorists of climate fiction placed on their canonical texts ultimately meant that their hopes for the form to effect change remained unfulfilled. In an effort to bring together these themes – crisis and chronology, and (informational) technocultures – the two halves of this special issue are hinged by our co-authored essay, which attempts to develop the issue’s thematics of intractability, impasse, and entrenchment through the concept of ‘stuckness’.
The first half of the contributions in this special issue speak to the stuckness of the present day through crisis and chronology. Stuckness as an affect structuring the experience of the 21st century inheres, for instance, in Dilâra Yilmaz’s exploration of the global rise of the ‘literary sad girl’ in contemporary fiction, exemplified by Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends (2017). Mandy Beck’s essay considers Brexit and ‘Brexlit’ within contemporary literature and culture more broadly, via in-depth analyses of Jonathan Coe’s Middle England (2018) and Sam Byers’ Perfidious Albion (2018). Beck’s account of these novels positions Brexit as less a singular moment of rupture than an ongoing process with a clear historical trajectory. Hanne Bolze’s study of the reception of climate change fiction among critics and scholars presents an account of the chronological complexities of this contemporary genre of crisis. Bolze shows how the expectations of the genre’s readers in literary institutions paradoxically curtailed or narrowed the potential of this emerging genre. For Gerald David Naughton and Yulia Pushkarevskaya Naughton, Lauren Berlant’s early assessment that ‘austerity, precarity, and awkwardness’ shape a contemporary cultural moment (2011) points to a tension between crisis and genre exemplified in Ali Smith’s How to Be Both (2014) and Percival Everett’s Telephone (2020). The last essay in this section is Daniel Dufournaud’s study of residual modernism in Joseph O’Neill’s most recent novel, Godwin (2024). For Dufournaud, the use of well-worn modernist stylistics in postmillennial fiction sparks critical reflection on stuckness; this leads into our co-authored essay, ‘Stuck on Stuckness: On the Intractability of the Present’, which serves as a hinge between the contributions that speak to crisis and chronology and the ones concerned with (informational) technocultures.
Contributions in the second half of our special issue speak to stuckness in (informational) technocultures as one dimension – amongst others – of everyday contemporary life. Mairi Power surveys a range of works by writers such as Don DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, Else Fitzgerald, A.M. Homes, Martin Lukes, Lucy Kellaway, Ruth Ozeki, and Richard Powers to examine how contemporary fiction engages with technological devices and achievements as well as ‘cycles of obsolescence and renewal’ (Chun 2011: xii). Kirsten Sandrock’s essay focuses on the way that Shakespeare’s authorial identity and writing have accrued currency in debates about technologies of textual production, including large language models. Sandrock surveys the comparisons between artificial intelligences and Shakespeare and illuminates this recurring rhetorical phenomenon with a discussion of Ian McEwan’s representation of an artificial intelligence encountering Shakespeare’s work in Machines Like Me: And People Like You (2019). Laila Sougri looks at how the (in)visible mediation of information is represented in four contemporary novels spanning the first 25 years of the 21st century: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003), Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (2019), and Percival Everett’s Dr. No (2022). Adding to the constant flow of (in)visible data, feedback loops, and medial obsolescence, Kiron Ward examines the way Wikipedia has redefined epistemic authority and how contemporary fiction responds to this distinctive context. Ward reads Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport (2019) and Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights (2007; English translation by Jennifer Croft, 2017) as two dialectically opposed literary responses to Wikipedia’s substantive reconfiguration of knowledge in the 21st century.
The issue concludes with C21’s inaugural ‘Roundtable Review’. The Roundtable features short essays by Leonid Bilmes, Laura Zander, Alex Houen, and Adam Kelly on Timothy Bewes’s Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (2022), followed by Bewes’s response to the various reflections and questions raised by its interlocutors.
C21 Literature and the 21st century
As a scholarly journal dedicated to the examination of the various genres, forms, and circulations of writing in the 21st century, C21 Literature aims in part to be an archive of contemporary literary studies.
Though C21 has been the site of debate over the contested canons of 21st-century writing, it is possible to use the journal’s back issues to construct the corpus or canon of contemporary writers whose work has been studied by scholars publishing in the journal. The most popular authors are slightly skewed because of two single-author special issues (issue 6.3 on David Mitchell and issue 11.2 on Ali Smith). Allowing for these weightings, the authors most commonly discussed in C21 are Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Ali Smith, David Mitchell, and Tom McCarthy. The journal has published scholarship on a wide range of authors and topics and this continues to expand.
Table of authors discussed in C21, 2012–2025, listed alphabetically by surname.
From the inaugural issue in 2012 to the present, the articles published in C21 have examined the ways that key world-historical events or moments are reflected and represented in literature. Recent C21 essays, for instance, have examined the relationship between the Covid-19 pandemic and literary culture, and grappled with the implications of this still-unfinished event for our understanding of the present day. Katharina Donn’s (2021) article, ‘Porous Skins: Pandemic Posthumanism in Speculative Fiction’, for instance, found in the representation of permeable membranes a way of comprehending interdependence and enmeshment made keener by the experience of pandemic isolation. Claire Squires’s (2021) timely analysis of bookselling in Britain under the restrictions of lockdown is complemented by Christina Lupton and Johanne Gormsen Schmidt’s (2023) powerful research on reading and parenting during the lockdowns in Denmark.
C21’s authors have always sought to understand and interpret the century’s events within frames of reference that revise our understanding of the present. The category of the ‘9/11 novel’, for instance, emerges from the September 11th coordinated terrorist attacks in 2001 that sparked a global ‘war on terrorism’. Rachel Sykes’ 2016 essay, ‘“All that Howling Space”: “9/11” and the Aesthetics of Noise in Contemporary American Fiction’, situates the ‘9/11 novels’ by Don DeLillo, John Updike, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jess Walter, and Amy Waldman within a longer history of noise in the American novel. Similarly, Kelsie Donnelly (2019) examines how Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) theorises a grief that refutes dominant modes of post-9/11 mourning. In both cases, but in very different ways, the event under discussion is considered with care and with some caution relating to the potential exceptionalisation of events, and the ways texts can both reinforce and critique such phenomena. More recently, C21 has seen work which seeks to reinterpret ‘Brexlit’ in a broader context of contemporary writing before and after the British vote to leave the European Union in 2016. For instance, where Ulla Rahbek (2023) reads Linda Grant’s Stranger City (2019) as registering broad temporal disruption, Erin Elizabeth Greer (2024) identifies continuities in Ali Smith’s politically engaged literary project both before and after the 2016 referendum.
Another key event in the early 21st century – though one that is less attached to a singular spectacle – was the 2008–2011 financial crisis that precipitated widespread and global patterns of austerity. The permutations of this event have been depicted in contemporary writing in a range of ways, and these works too have been repeatedly addressed in C21. The term ‘post-Celtic Tiger Irish literature’, for instance, designates the body of fiction produced following the 2008 recession (preceded by a short period of economic growth); within this context, Molly Slavin (2017) homes in on the uninhabited housing developments (‘ghost estates’) as ghostly remnants of Ireland’s legacies of economically unsound policies and reminders of a lost futurity. More recently, Daisy Alice Powell’s (2025) reading of Mike Gayle’s All the Lonely People (2020) and Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (2017) as ‘Up Lit’ examines peripheral characters excluded from their central recovery narratives as indicative of the neoliberal logic undergirding narratives that purport to offer comfort and hope in the turbulent present.
Beyond the 21st century’s monumental events, scholars attending to contemporary writing in C21 have also registered more gradual paradigm shifts like the impact of digitality on consciousness and global communities (Mousoutzanis 2016; McDougall 2019; Sircar 2023) and the sociopolitical ramifications of increasingly precarious labour conditions alongside increasingly immaterial products of labour (Watts 2020). After all, while it is undoubtedly the case that the global world order has been shaped by moments of rupture, event-based logics and narratives are necessarily delimited in scope and cannot offer an exhaustive account of complex systemic phenomena and histories that contextualise events. Indeed, the proliferation of such focused event-based approaches to the present can itself become exhausting, generating a surfeit of fragmented interpretations that can inhibit holistic understanding of the broader dynamics at play. Literary texts, and the kind of rigorous analyses of such texts published in C21, can help us understand the 21st century’s proliferation of events, and the kinds of systemic crises that underpin them.
Yet, now that the 21st century is a quarter over, how might contemporary studies balance the need for materialist accounts of watershed moments with an understanding of the endemic conditions that intersect with them and produce those very moments? Moreover, can we bring together the various movements, cycles, turns and trends in contemporary literature studies with any cohesion? In the early years of the 2000s, a flurry of critical efforts emerged to name, characterise, and periodise the present as ‘post-postmodernist’ (McLaughlin 2004, 2012; Nealon 2012; Pignagnoli 2023), ‘digimodernist’ (Kirby 2009), ‘metamodernist’ (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010, 2015; van den Akker, Gibbons, and Vermeulen 2017), and ‘cosmodernist’ (Moraru 2010). 21st-century literature, however, has by and large continued to evade these attempts to fit it with an ‘ism’. Since early issues of C21, the utility of such terms has been hotly debated in articles by Martin Paul Eve (2012), Rob Coley and Dean Lockwood (2012), and Nick Turner (2013). If the century began with pre-emptive critical efforts to fix a label on the literature of the present this was, as much as anything, an ‘attempt to register [the] extension/rejection of the postmodern (Bentley, Hubble, and Wilson 2015: 16). In the introduction to Postmodern/Postwar—And After, Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, and Daniel Worden note that ‘studies of contemporary literature have also increasingly set aside “postmodernism” as an organizing category’, and have positioned the 1990s as the end or exhaustion of postmodern aesthetics’ (2016: 5). At the same time, the 21st century has entered into a complex relationship with modernism’s time-warping art, celebrating each passing centenary of writing that responded to its own present. As James and Seshagiri have argued, 21st-century writing develops a great variety of responses to the literature of one hundred years before, as contemporary writers ‘extend, reanimate, and repudiate twentieth-century modernist literature’ (2014). Shaw and Upstone (2021) have more recently framed the contemporary through the concept of the ‘transglossic’, foregrounding elements of speaking across boundaries and striving to depart from recursions towards modernism and postmodernism. Now, as we reach the quarter-century, are we able to think more about the period’s literature in terms which are wholly its own? Is the contemporary – that category which has so often been theorised, following Barthes and Agamben, as fundamentally out of step with its own time – starting to synchronise its watch with the temporal bounds of the current century?
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to the participants of Post45 UK’s 2025 ‘Work in Progress’ group for their constructive and insightful feedback to an early version of this introduction. This feedback ultimately led to the division of the theorization in the ‘Stuck on Stuckness: On the Intractability of the Present’ essay featured in this special issue.
Competing Interests
The authors have no competing interests to declare for this editorial introduction.
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