Self-Reflexivity and Generic Change in Contemporary Black British Women’s Literature

Description

This paper proposes a methodological framework for analysing how self-reflexive narrative strategies (e.g. metanarration, intertextual references, framing devices, reader address) interact with genre conventions in 21st-century Black British women’s literature. In our paper, we explore how such strategies may make legible the ways that authorship, reader expectation, and the literary market shape and are shaped by generic categories. Our main argument is that, by modelling a self-conscious, genre-reflexive reading strategy for the reader, genre reflexivity in these novels teaches readers “how to read” (Gass qtd. in Jablon 177). Moreover, based on a cognitive and reader-centred understanding of genre (see Sinding, Allen), we contend that self-reflexivity in contemporary novels facilitates generic change, i.e. the development of existing genres and the formation of new ones.
The paper deploys the term self-reflexivity when a work refers to (an aspect of) itself or the semiotic system it belongs to in such a way that it creates additional “discursive meaning” (Wolf 19; e.g. intertextual references to Snow White contribute to the characterization of a stepmother in a contemporary novel). A self-reflexive reference then becomes metareferential when it establishes a logical difference between an object-level and a meta-level (as, for instance, frame narratives or metalepses do) and elicits in recipients a “meta-awareness” of a narrative’s fictional (“in the sense of artificial and ‘invented’”) status (Wolf 31). Even though scholars have already noted that genre frequently is an object of metareferential reflection in novels, few have proposed a comprehensive theory of how the category of genre interacts with self-reflexivity and metareference.
This paper examines how self-reflexivity and metafiction come to function as a “catalyst” for generic change by focusing on the cultural and political affordances of the self-reflexive treatment of genre in contemporary novels. Building on previous explorations of the role of metafiction to facilitate “genre memory” and/or “genre critique” (Hauthal 2013; see also Nadj 2006, Nünning et al. 2006, Niederhoff 2022), we are especially interested in the processes of genre development and the formation of new genres. In a first step, our inquiry sets out by distinguishing between “genre-reflexive” and “meta-generic” references: while the former designate references to altergeneric categories (e.g. a discussion of Greek tragedy in a contemporary travel novel set in Greece), we suggest to use the latter to describe references which actualise the genre they refer to in the text (e.g. a narrator announcing that readers are reading their diary). In a second step, we will illustrate the productivity of this distinction by comparing different case studies.
Drawing on a broader corpus of 21st-century metafiction by Black British female writers, our case study of Sara Collins' 2019 novel The Confessions of Frannie Langton will demonstrate the increasing popularity of metafictional novels beyond the historiographic kind and the contemporary tendency to combine metafiction with a pointed political message concerning readers’ expectations, the literary canon or the cultural and economic forces that shape both individual authorship and the literary market at large. Reading these novels and their intertexts through the lens of Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s understanding of how a Black queer feminist “poetics of difference” (see also bell hooks “Postmodern Blackness”) translates into formal narrative experiment, we observe that many novels do not only function as agents of generic change, but also make the metalevel process of genre development or genre formation part of the narrative by self-consciously performing their generic similarity and difference on the page. By foregrounding usually latent processes of recognizing and blending of genre conventions, we argue, they uncover the performative actualization of genre during the reading process (Allen 48) and urge readers to actively question the cultural and political affordances of generic legacies while interacting with the novel in front of them as a constructed, mediated and marketed textual artefact. Thus, through their self-reflexive treatment of genre, the novels under scrutiny instill in readers a post-postmodern sense of “new responsibility” (Shaw & Upstone 2021) for the way they read as well as for the generic legacies through which we “narrativize” our experience of the world.

Period	12 Sept 2025
Event title	International Workshop: Generic Change and Novelistic Experiment in 21st-Century Narratives
Event type	Workshop
Location	BrusselsShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International