Patterns, Threads and Tendencies: Metamodernism and the Memoirisation of British Biography

Abstract

This article aims to trace the stirrings of a new structure of feeling (or emerging cultural logic), also known as metamodernism, in contemporary British biography. It focuses on the hybridisation of the autobiographical and the biographical in examples of twenty-first-century non-fictional life narratives in book form. It presents a detailed reading of Julia Blackburn’s Threads: The Delicate Life of John Craske (2015) against the background of metamodernism theory, especially the latter’s conceptualisation of the “post-postmodern” re-exploration of the referentiality of texts, “dephtiness” and “situated affect.” It investigates the current “memoirisation” of biography as a sign of the so-called repurposing of (post)modernist form that is said to be characteristic of metamodern aesthetics and can also be seen at work in contemporary autofiction, which typically combines life writing and fiction. Blackburn’s biography is close-read in comparison to Mike Parker’s On the Red Hill (2019) and Celia Paul’s Letters to Gwen John (2022) as two other instances of the metamodern memoirisation of British biography.