Metaperspectives in Contemporary Literary Fiction

Metapersectives in Language and Literature 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.

The concept of the metaperspective, centring on the thoughts of characters about other characters' views of them, is applied for the first time to contemporary works of literary fiction, and aligned 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. Alongside these novels, the author includes analysis of all works awarded the Booker Prize between 2000 and 2020. Each novel is tied to a specific iteration of the metaperspective, and explored linguistically and thematically. These are labelled as: the discourse-architectural metaperspective; the communal metaperspective; the racialised metaperspective; the literalised metaperspective. These varieties of the metaperspective are linked to typical linguistic indices and thematic preoccupations within each of the novels under analysis.

This original study of an entirely new concept within the disciplines of stylistics and narratology has enormous potential and value for 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.