Many of the formal innovations of contemporary fiction arise from a collective sense of ceaseless crisis—a recognition that traditional modes of storytelling, forged in earlier cultural climates, may now be overrun and unable to accommodate an age of accelerated instability. This essay examines two such formally adventurous novels: Ali Smith’s How to Be Both (2014) and Percival Everett’s Telephone (2020), both of which employ multiple published versions to unsettle narrative unity and readerly expectations. Smith’s novel appears in two randomly sequenced editions; Everett’s in three distinct iterations. The essay argues that such strategies may be seen as responses to the condition Lauren Berlant terms “cruel optimism”: a structure of feeling in which attachments to normative fantasies of the good life persist, despite their increasing impossibility. In foregrounding variation, contingency, and aesthetic instability, these novels register what Berlant describes as a cultural moment shaped by “austerity, precarity, and awkwardness,” and reflect the experience of a world in which the genres of meaning-making are themselves in question. They do so, however, not by offering resolution, but by inhabiting the impasse—what Berlant elsewhere calls “genre flailing” - and devising alternative modes of formal coherence in the face of disruption. The result is fiction that portrays the very crisis that structurally forms it.

This article considers the effect that Wikipedia has had on fiction of the 21st-century, and proposes that one distinctive feature of Wikipedia’s influence on this period has been the tension it has put on how novelists conceive of the relationship between facticity and authority. The first half of the article looks at how facticity and authority work on Wikipedia, drawing illustratively from Olga Tokarczuk’s Nobel Lecture (2019) and Ben Lerner’s short story ‘The Hofmann Wobble: Wikipedia and the Problem of Historical Memory’ (2023). The second half consists of a comparative reading of engagements with Wikipedia in Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (2019) and Tokarczuk’s Bieguni (2007; trans. Flights 2017), in which I consider the two novels' contradictory responses to Wikipedia: Ducks as a turn towards the authority of the self, Flights as a valorisation of the self’s engagement with the other.

This article joins recent scholarly work that considers postmillennial fiction's indebtedness to canonical modernism. It argues that postmillennial fiction indebted to modernism does not treat modernist themes and styles as resources for innovation in the present so much as it raises questions about the lack of change over time. This formulation finds an illuminating case study in Joseph O'Neill's novel Godwin (2024), which continues O'Neill's career-long effort to recontextualize the preoccupations and stylistic signatures of modernism. O'Neill redeploys such modernist tropes as grail quests and the imperialist engagement with racial and ethnic difference to satirical ends, and he adopts a style that echoes modernist fiction in foregrounding the limits and affordances of characterological perspective, in moving among multiple layers of embedded narration, and in the use of scambled narrative sequence. The article draws on the work of Raymond Williams to frame O'Neill's aesthetic as "residual modernism" that activates literature's powers of critique. It routes its discussion of O'Neill's residual modernism through Zadie Smith's widely read essay "Two Paths for the Novel" (2008). Where Smith sees in O'Neill's 2008 novel, Netherland, an effete aesthetic, this article contends that O'Neill's residual modernism affirms literature's powers of critique at a time when promiment voices in the humanities are advocating for postcritical methodologies. Call it the stubborn path of the novel. To label Godwin a work of residual mdoernism is not to accuse O'Neill of hackneyed writing but to argue that the novel is provocative not in spite but because of its familiarity.

This article asks how the technological devices and achievements that hold unmistakable status in contemporary life are represented in contemporary fiction. I suggest three levels of engagement with which to define and analyse the presence of technology in contemporary texts. These are: the reference to technology within fiction, the representation of a digital environment by fiction, and the creation of digital fiction. A variety of literary works are considered in this analysis, including works by Don DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, Else Fitzgerald, A.M Homes, Martin Lukes and Lucy Kellaway, Ruth Ozeki, and Richard Powers. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s work on obsolescence is utilised as consistent frame in analysis of each literary example, used to question the effects and issues in engaging with digital culture. The danger of irrelevance due to the relentless cycle of digital upgrading is highlighted as a perceived, but not always realised, threat to engagement and legacy. Consistent attention is paid to literary heritage in interrogating both fiction’s established record of technological experimentation and the resistance to depictions of contemporary digitality. Conclusions uphold the value of fictional engagement with technology in a continuation of this heritage, and in authentically depicting the contemporary moment.

The Century at 25 brings together a range of reflections on contemporary literature and literary studies at the quarter mark of the 21st century. This short introduction outlines the scope and organisation of our special issue, which has two strands: one concerned with crisis and chronology, and the other with (informational) technocultures. Connecting these strands is the concept of ‘stuckness’, explored centrally in our contribution: ‘Stuck on Stuckness: On the Intractability of the Present’. This introduction also contextualises the special issue in two ways. First, it reflects on itsplace within the aims, publication model, and history of C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings. Second, it locates this issue within a range of other scholarly approaches to the periodisation and historicisation of the present.

Past decades have seen a rise in scholarly interest in the impact of digital technologies on literary production (Berensmeyer 2022; Kirschenbaum 2016; Lyons and Marquilhas 2017; Côrtes Maduro 2017). However, little attention has been paid to the influence of one such recent technological innovation: automatic speech recognition (ASR). This article explores the affordances and limitations presented by this modern-day writing technology through the case study of renowned author Richard Powers. It will discuss how speech recognition’s hardware and software shaped Powers’s writing process. Subsequently, it will critically evaluate Powers’s claim that ASR facilitates a more immediate and authentic mode of storytelling by considering the technology’s operation within a multifaceted network of remediation (Grusin and Bolter 2000). The second part of the article will complicate Powers’s views further by analyzing his novel Orfeo (2014), which traces parallels between the author and its protagonist—a composer obsessed with wrestling free from the constraints of his medium in his quest for authentic artistic expression. Overall, this article will argue for the importance of understanding digital writing technologies as complex media networks that not only shape literary products but also their authors and modes of reception. Powers’s embrace of dictation software thus not only unveils a fascinating chapter in the evolution of writing practices but also beckons a deeper exploration of how digital tools redefine the relationship between author, reader, and text.