Jeanette Winterson

The Nets of Modernism and Postmodernism People are accustomed to the terms "modernism" and "postmodernism", however, pointing out the thin line between them is nearly impossible. Some of us may grasp the idea and attempt to draw boundaries, but they often fall into one another. The term "postmodern" suggests the fact that it comes after the "modern", that there is a relationship between the two. This essential relationship can shed light on the fact that modernism should be highlighted in order to lay hold of postmodernity. In this fashion, literature can set the tone and situate a framework, and tell us what they are or what they are not. James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry are the cornerstones of English literature and they can set out a basic understanding of these two phenomenons through three classifications: the concept of truth, form, totalization and/or deconstruction. Modernism has a tendency towards being precise with its clear-cut classifications. Its main objective is to reveal the universality and absolute truth. (Hutcheon 23) Postmodernism, on the other hand, manifests itself through multiple fragmented layers. In contrast to modernism, it does not promise an absolute truth; but uses playfulness and irony as its ultimate tools which often result in hyperreality. (Hutcheon 9) In this regard, Joyce's point of view uncovers the inclination of modernism because he claims that the object of art is the mere 'truth'. A true (and modern) artist should portray life in all its tedious reality. (Parsons 35) In A Portrait, Joyce presents the life and the development of an artist, Joyce himself, from his childhood until maturity. In doing so, however, Joyce experiments with the new styles of narrating. His idea of being 'true' does not follow conventional forms like chronological plots. Instead, he captures the disjointed moments and focuses on the interior monologue, thus portrays the identity of the character through his expressions. Language, in this case, plays a significant role in unfolding this technique. For instance , the opening line of A Portrait-'Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the rod and this moocow…met a nicens little boy named baby cuckoo…' (Joyce 5)-sets forth the psychic state of the character while revealing the fact that he is just a child. Hence, his loyalty to the truth becomes apparent. Jeanette Winterson, however,

Jeannette Winterson’s novels can always be studied from a postmodern perspective. Postmodernism, though a loosely-defined term, makes reference to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic condition which does not
have a direct predominant hierarchy, and epitomizes extreme entanglement, discrepancy, uncertainty, diversity, and heterogeneity. In this sense, The Passion (1987) is written to deconstruct the various domineering cultural, social and moral conventions or constructed realities and norms of Western civilisation. Techniques of postmodernism – temporal and spatial distortions, gender roles, parody, pastiche, historiographic metafiction, irony – are often used by postmodernist writers in their works. This article aims to pinpoint that Winterson is resisting dominant ideologies and discourses in The Passion, and trying to reconstruct a free and alternative discourse in the same society through postmodernist techniques in the narrative of the novel.

BOOKS Alice in Transmedia Wonderland. Curiouser and Curio ser New Forms of a Children’s Classic. Jefferson: McFarland, 2016. (forthcoming) Body-Texts in the Novels of Angela Carter. Writing from a Corporeagraphic Point of View . Lewiston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. ( pp. 372, ISBN10: 0-7734-48926 ISBN13: 978-0-7734-4892-6) EDITORIAL WORK 5. Co-editor of EJES special journal issue Feminist Interventions in Intermedial Studies (forthcoming in 2017) with Dr Catriona McAra 4. Exploring the Cultural History of Continental Europ ean Freak Shows and Enfreakment. Eds. Anna Kérchy and Andrea Zittlau. Newcastle Upon Ty e: Cambridge Scholars Press. 2012. (Isbn13: 978-1-4438-4134-4 Isbn: 1-443 8-4134-X) 3. Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales: How Ap plying New Methods Generates New Meanings. Ed. Anna Kérchy. Lewiston, Lampeter: The Edwin Me llen Press, 2011. (pp. 520, ISBN10: 0-7734-1519-X ISBN13: 978-0-7734-151 9-5) 2. The Iconology of Law and Order . Legal and Cosmic . (P...

Just like Winterson herself, The Passion is not an ordinary story yet an interesting combination of history and fiction with postmodernist touches.

Therefore, this paper will analyse time, setting and narration of this novel in terms of postmodernism.

This essay placed second in the Blackwell's Essay Competition and explores how we read, and the role of the reader. Through analysis of Jeanette Winterson's 'Written on the Body' (a postmodernist text) and drawing on the critical thought of Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes, I argue for a mode of reading which is inherently interactive and has subversive consequences for our understanding of the role of the reader. “Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there”, writes Winterson. Just as the body is text, so is the text body. The body-text grows with its readers [...] who take on the role of authors.

Jeanette Winterson’s novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985)
illustrates the story of a young girl, Jeanette, who experiences suppressive
upbringing at the hands of her mother and her surroundings. Through the
portrayal of her transition into adulthood, the novel touches on numerous
challenging issues such as gender, identity, and the reliability of the
mainstream patriarchal discourse. The main character’s gradual
transformation reveals the controversial aspects of her society juxtaposed
with her sexual orientation as a lesbian and her oppositional stance against
the ingrained doctrine of the Church. This study will, in this respect, discuss
Jeanette’s rebellion as an individual against her oppressive society in
Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit through specific references
from the primary source and relevant secondary sources in an ultimate
attempt to reveal how identity, gender roles, and truth are all discursive
practices.

After two devastating world wars, humanity witnessed the collapse of all of their facts, values and judgments one by one that had been accepted as absolute truth. However, this destruction did not mean the disappearance of everything that they owned; it was simply a radical reassessment of previous judgments which were perceived as determined stereotypes and certain facts. Thus, from the middle of the twentieth century, the intense relationship between human history and the postmodern movement has gained speed. With this movement, all of the traditional judgments in a society and culture began to be questioned. Along with postmodernism, the phenomenon of gender, history and reality was reconsidered, and so it showed people the existence and possibility of other perspectives. This study aims to analyse Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson who is one of the most important postmodern writers of the literary world, in accordance with the postmodernism theory in terms of gender, history and fiction that the author has questioned and reinterpreted in her book. Throughout this study, how the postmodern elements, which the author has used meticulously, problematize the mentioned facts and what kind of results they bring about have been examined. Combining the seventeenth and twentieth centuries in her work, Winterson tells the historical facts of the previous century through perspectives of her fictional and extraordinary characters, on the other hand, she reveals how history is accepted in the twentieth century with similar characters of previous ones. Consisting of interchangeable narrators, this work paves the way for its readers to question the place of women in a society, the concept of time and the reliability of truth with experiences through each of her characters.

Sexing the Cherry problematises the relationship between reality and fiction. Magic Realism, introduced by a German art critic Franz Roh in 1925 which got popular only in 1940s, is a literary genre which is a twisted form of reality with magical elements added in it. Many writers prefer to put such elements in their stories in order to grab and maintain the attention of their audience as the audience gets more engaged wandering about the magic in the story. One such story is of Sexing the Cherry which is a postmodernist work by Jeannette Winterson and the elements of magic realism and intertextuality have been prominently featured in it. It was published in 1989 and is set in 17th century London. Along with the magical instances in it, the novel gives us an insight about gender, sexuality, religion, politics, innovation and desires. It further forces us to doubt the reality and think about the lies that exist within it, which we tell ourselves to make the world a believable place to live. Sexing the Cherry is a historiographic metafiction and is a product of Winterson's process of rewriting and retelling of stories with defining time as fluid which is not absolute and is rather relative. In this text, Winterson plays with the flow of narrative along with the timeframe it's set in while playing with the idea of reality and fiction. This piece of writing not only challenges the reality but also challenges the usual narrative structure. RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN REALITY AND FICTION IN SEXING THE CHERRY We begin the story with Jordan's narration where he gives us a hint that the novel is about some unusual journeys. At this point, we try to conclude that the text is a travelogue but he breaks our notion and alerts us that it is not going to be an ordinary travelogue. He claims to tell a story about places that don't lie within maps. He then makes us doubt if the journeys are real or

In this essay, I explore the myths presented within two contemporary novels, Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated.  I propose that myths are used within these two texts as a meta-modern device to transcend post-modern theories, such as post-structuralism and deconstruction.  Fictional narratives, either passed down through the Jewish shtetl’s generations or those created by Jeanette for her own sake, ultimately enable a better understanding and connection to reality even while these narratives are separate from that reality due to their imagined origins.  While examining these cultural/personal myths, I draw a closer connection between religion and myth-telling as both Jeanette and the townspeople of Trachimbrod are deeply religious (Christianity in Oranges… and Judaism in EII).  While both Christianity and Judaism are called into question due to traumatic experiences within these novels, the characters remain devoted to their religious heritages and in order to remain devout the characters develop new stories, new myths in order to reconcile the past to the present and offer a new hope for the future.  It is important to note that within this meta-modern analysis similar themes are found within these novels, yet they belong to different countries, one to British literature and the other American; the novels were written almost twenty years apart by opposite genders regarding two different religions.  The comparison of these novels demonstrates that certain concerns and subjects can be universal, or perhaps a better term for this day and age would be trans-global.  Differences such as generation, gender, nationality, creed, etc. can be negotiated when authors and readers recognize a common humanity, a common history, and the common myth-making that bridge us together in a desire to belief in something and not nothing.  I include research from Nicoline Timmer, a meta-modern scholar, Amy Hungerford, a professor at Yale who researches the reinvestment of religious practice in contemporary American fiction, as well as authorial commentary from Winterson and Foer.

This paper looks at modern appropriations of the Heracles myth, with particular respect to Disney’s Hercules (1991) and Jeanette Winterson’s novel Weight, but firstly with a historical perspective to demonstrate how Heracles’ character has changed and evolved from antiquity to the present day, and furthermore to show which aspects of Heracles’ heroic construct have been favoured for representation.  It discusses representations of the hero from the Palaeolithic period, in Homer and Classical Athens, the Hellenistic and Roman period, during the Renaissance as well as in Shakespeare, before discussing how some of these aspects of Heracles have been incorporated into the representations of the hero in the modern literary and film traditions.

Submitted in 2008 as part of the MA Classical Studies module in Ancient Myth.

This thesis examines Jeanette Winterson's use of fantasy to explore and offer alternatives to the rationalised world of modernity.  In doing so, this thesis proposes Winterson exhibits cultural politics which are Romantic in nature.  Using Kathryn Hume's theory of fantasy as a literary approach to give meaning to the world of reality, Winyerson offes another vision of the world.  Through close reading analysis, this study focuses on Tanglewreck (2007) and The Battle of the Sun (2009) and offers a brief analysis of the Romantics and fantasy found in her other works.  In determining Winterson as a Romantic, this thesis directs its attention to her use of the artistic imagination, use of language and style and her themes of love and connection.  Winterson is recognised as offering a post Christian spirituality which develops love as transcendent.  This irrational approach to understanding life is Winterson's alternative to  rationalised reality.

The tradition of telling stories starting with the oral tradition continued with the emergence of fairy tales. Although their primary object is to instruct the readers and to impose what is good and what is bad, fairy tales throughout the years have been a perfect resource for especially postmodern writers who aim at deconstructing metanarratives. The main purpose of this study is to discuss Angela Carter's and Jeanette Winterson's feminist approach to the patriarchal understanding of the traditional fairy tale by dealing with issues such as gender, marriage, love and gender roles through postmodern techniques of rewriting, parody and intertextuality.

Jeanette Winterson’s infamous use of intertextuality and self-quotation, often dismissed as arrogance, compels her readers to locate her works within an interconnected cycle. This thesis argues that Winterson’s reference and repetition are evidence of a poststructuralist project: she reconceives the unities of autobiography, history, and identity as networks of relations. Foucauldian archaeology, the study of discourse as a system of references rather than a thematic unity, provides an appropriate toolkit in studying Winterson’s discursive method. Her memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? returns to many of the same events of her semi-autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, suggesting that any attempt at writing the authoritative version of one’s life story is always partial or fractured. Much the same, the fantastic elements and self-deprecating narrators within her historical novels The Passion and Sexing the Cherry imply authoritative or historical facts are as fictions, open to the surreal or contradictory and accessed through the personal. Last, in Written on the Body, Winterson encourages her reader to interpret the narrator’s gender from textual clues, just as the reader of Weight confronts biographical parallels between author and character; in both cases, identity is a narrative, open to play and revision.

""The current work aims to analyse the characters’ quest for the self and their process of growth throughout the narratives. This work is composed of an introduction on the similarities and the intertextual connections between the novels and the literary genres at issue, a chapter about the characters’ self-development as related to the concept of Bildungsroman alongside the concept of quest narrative and finally a chapter about gender ambiguity."

RAMOS, Rodrigo Viriato — Quest for the Self in The Passion of New Eve and
in Sexing the Cherry. Tese de mestrado. Universidade de Aveiro, 2010."

Jeannette Winterson’s novels can always be studied from a postmodern perspective. Postmodernism, though a loosely-defined term, makes reference to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic condition which does not
have a direct predominant hierarchy, and epitomizes extreme entanglement, discrepancy, uncertainty, diversity, and heterogeneity. In this sense, The Passion (1987) is written to deconstruct the various domineering cultural, social and moral conventions or constructed realities and norms of Western civilisation. Techniques of postmodernism – temporal and spatial distortions, gender roles, parody, pastiche, historiographic metafiction, irony – are often used by postmodernist writers in their works. This article aims to pinpoint that Winterson is resisting dominant ideologies and discourses in The Passion, and trying to reconstruct a free and alternative discourse in the same society through postmodernist techniques in the narrative of the novel.

The refrain of Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, “It’s the clichés that cause the trouble,” speaks to a lover’s anxiety: how to articulate love without resorting to practised tropes. Are the words “I love you” still potent when bodily boundaries are disrupted, or when the history behind these words is held with suspicion? Winterson’s genderless narrator responds by constructing a love-poem to her/his beloved in search of an original expression of love. In appropriating colonial, medical, and chivalric discourses—that is, in emptying out the historical and political content of these words, and reapplying them to the object of queer desire—the lover attempts to tailor language to match the beloved: exploring, fragmenting, and worshipping her body.

Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods (2007) manifest an environmentalist awareness of the increasingly destructive power of human technologies while challenging the prevalent models we employ to think about the planet as well as its human and non-human inhabitants. Both novels probe what it means to be human in a universe plagued by entropy in the era of the Anthropocene. For the purposes of this essay, I will concentrate particularly on Dick's and Winterson's portrayals of the dystopian city as a site of interconnections and transformations against a backdrop of encroaching entropy and impending doom. Drawing on the work of several (critical) posthumanists who are primarily interested in dissolving oppositions such as between nature/culture, biology/technology, I show how the displacement of the centrality of human agency due to the intrusive nature of advanced technology is happening in the broader context of the Anthropocene. I also argue that the dystopian cityscapes envisioned in both novels become places that allow for the possibility of new forms of subjectivity to emerge.

RESEARCH MA THESIS: The main research question this thesis investigates is: "how is the notion of the Anthropocene challenged, refined and reimagined in contemporary feminist theory and fiction and in what ways does an approach via narratives negate a binary and teleological reading of the Anthropocene?" A multiple and threaded approach of theory and fiction is explored in this thesis. How the story is told is always at least as important as what that story consists of. So, the questions this thesis is asking and after are: "what kinds of narratives, what kinds of metaphors in narratives are being deployed to talk about the Anthropocene?". In order to come to an understanding of what it might mean to live in the Anthropocene attention is drawn to storytelling and the notion of narrative. It is clear that Earth is in constant change. The idea of the Anthropocene frames this change into a narrative of human responsibility and consequences for the human inhabitants of Earth. Only through particular narratives and metaphors does a changing Earth become socially and culturally meaningful. The work of feminist theorists and fiction writers that is analysed (i.e. the work of Braidotti, Haraway, Zylinska, Colebrook, Atwood and Winterson) reflects this practice of knowledge production. In both the theoretical and literary approaches to the Anthropocene that are considered here, a meaningful engagement with a changing planet is key. Whether through coming up with alternatives, pushing the boundaries of what the Anthropocene has come to stand for, or engaging with it through a particular lens, contemporary feminist theory and fiction have taken the challenges the Anthropocene represents and faced them head on.

This dissertation contributes to scholarship on contemporary fairy-tale fiction and film by looking at the figures of the storyteller and listener and the act of storytelling itself in a range of texts produced or translated into English within the last thirty years. My focus texts include the television mini-series Arabian Nights (1999); the feature length film Pan’s Labyrinth (2006); the collection Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins by Emma Donoghue (1997); and the embedded cycle of stories ―The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses‖ in Jeanette Winterson‘s novel Sexing the Cherry (1989). All of these texts thematize the act of narration in a variety of ways and to various ends. I consider how the relationship of narrator and listener is played out in relation to gendered and sexual subjectivity and the desires that the tales inscribe. I ask how each of these texts engages with normative and queer desires, and how these desires are represented and narratively produced through an exploration of the textual dynamics of metanarrational comment, narrative framing, and narrative authority.
In the first half of the dissertation I examine the dynamics of narrative authority in two cinematic engagements with the fairy tale. These chapters take the cinematic narrator into account as a prime mover in directing the ways narrative authority flows. I contend that in both cases narrative authority is related to gender and political and familial hierarchies. The second half of my dissertation explores narrative and sexual desire from a perspective that allows for a broader understanding of how hetero-normative and non-normative subjects are textually produced both thematically and formally. I demonstrate a reading practice that seeks ―queer possibility‖ and emphasizes flexibility and epistemological constructs rather than the ontological status of a text as either inherently queer or straight.

Sigmund Freud's notion of the " phallic mother " is a significant concept to examine gender, sexuality and power relations not only in social life but also in a literary work. Although phallic mother/woman concept is mostly used to describe omnipotent women in many texts, mostly based on its psychoanalytic origin, this study argues that it is an inadequate portrayal to describe feminine potential and power. In this respect, this study aims to propose another concept that should be used to describe powerful, feminine, securing, un-authoritatively maternal, and freeing mother/woman as " vulvic mother/woman " instead of " phallic ". To examine the differences between phallic woman and vulvic woman, the study analyzes two woman/mother characters from Jeanette Winterson's two novels – Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Sexing the Cherry. Based on the theories from psychoanalysis and a survey on mythology, this study tries to take attention to feminine conceptualizations in relation to the analyzed novels.

Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods (2007) pictures a futuristic world in which every body is technologically, discursively, and materially constructed. First of all, The Stone Gods foregrounds the futuristic conceptualization of embodiment and posthuman gendered bodies in relation to biotechnology, biogenetics, and robotics, interrogating contemporary dimensions of the interface between the human and the machine, nature and culture. Secondly, the novel focuses on environmental concerns relevant to our present age. More specifically, however, drawing our attention to posthuman toxic bodies in terms of " trans-corporeality, " as suggested by Stacy Alaimo, The Stone Gods is an invaluable literary means to speculate on our " posthuman predicament, " in Rosi Braidotti's words, and global ecological imperilment. In The Stone Gods, Winterson provides not only a warning against the dehumanization of the human in the process of posthumanization, but also a salient picture of posthuman trans-corporeal subjects through a discussion of the beneficial and deleterious effects of biotechnology and machines on human-nonhuman " naturecultures. " On this view, looking at both human and nonhuman bodies through a trans-corporeal lens would contribute to an understanding of how material-discursive structures can profoundly transform human-nonhuman life on Earth.

The usage of self-reflexivity in Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body serves to emphasize the fictionality of its own narrative. By doing so, it highlights to readers the fact that many aspects of life's experiences, such as love, though perceived as objective reality by most people, can only in fact exist as a subjective experience for individuals. Jeanette Winterson's metafictional novel Written on the Body employs the technique of self-reflexivity, drawing attention to its fictional nature " in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality " and to " explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text " (Waugh 2). By making prominent the artificiality of the narrator's 'real experiences' within the narrative, the metafiction is suggesting to readers the probable fictionality of their similar experiences in the actual world. The ungendered narrator in the novel struggles with the concept of love; he or she desperately wants to objectify his or her experience of love into concrete reality but realizes that it is almost impossible to do so. The inability to turn his or her individual experience of love into objective reality consequently causes the narrator to believe that the notion of love itself is perhaps fictional, existing merely as a subjective reality for him or her. Therefore, in this metafiction, self-reflexivity is used to point readers out to the fact that since the experience of love, perceived by most people to be an objective reality, disallows objectification, 'love' can only remain as an abstract concept and exist as subjective experiences for individuals.

In this paper, I strive to demonstrate how Jeanette Winterson, in The Powerbook, challenges the binary functioning of the Western Tradition and enacts the blurring of boundaries between male and female gender, between material and virtual
ontologies, and between author and text, thus exposing the fluidity of these apparently opposing categories. Winterson‟s text is explored in ways that show how she, by writing
in a way that can be related to Donna Haraway‟s cyborg manifesto and to Karen Barad‟s agential realist ontology, both confronts the idea of a self-evident author and makes evident how both sides of the binary “intra-act,” a term suggested by Barad, and contaminate each other.

In part because I'm now teaching at the alma mater of James Tiptree, Jr., I've decided to try something very different for me next semester. (...Also in part due to Chaucerian's Guilt?)

Course Description:

Some historians of science fiction would locate the beginnings of the modern genre in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but the space that would later come to be called "science fiction" was for many decades dominated by male authors, readers, filmmakers, and fans. In the early 20th century, the first science fiction pulp magazines printed short stories written almost exclusively by men, and the typical narratives of the time catered to a readership at least perceived to be almost exclusively male as well, rarely featuring women as characters in any role except that of the damsel-in-distress or villainous temptress. Even when Sarah Lawrence alumna Alice Sheldon began publishing overtly feminist science fiction under the pen name "James Tiptree, Jr." in the 1960s and 70s, some readers refused to believe that a woman could be behind the pseudonym. Today the ranks of science fiction authors are filled with female authors who have found the genre a unique tool for exploring women's issues and, often, for developing feminist ideas in an imaginative space, for example by positing the possibility of radically different social structures in the far future, or by pondering more fluid alien bodies and gender identities or the consequences of new reproductive technologies. In spite -- and in defiance -- of the historical and to some extent continuing identification of science fiction as a predominantly masculine or even "macho" field, our syllabus will consist entirely of female authors writing within or otherwise in close proximity to genre science fiction: not only Shelley and other earlier authors of so-called proto science fiction, but also major figures of 20th and 21st-century literature such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson, and many more. We will also examine some of the perhaps unexpected convergences between feminist theory and science fiction, best exemplified in the works of Donna Haraway.

از میان سروده های مهدی اخوان ثالث «زمستان» از همه مشهورتر است. در سروده های کردی پرتو کرمانشاهی هم ظاهراً شعری که به «ارمنی» مشهور شده از همه نام آور تر است. در این پژوهش این دو سروده از دیدگاه محتوایی و نشانه شناختی بررسی و تحلیل شده است. نتایج نشان می دهد که پرتو در سرایش «ارمنی» در دو سطحِ تصویر کلی و نشانه‌ها از «زمستان» اخوان ثالث متأثر بوده است. در طرح کلی، پناه بردن شبانه فردی بی خانمان به ساقی، درخواست از او، عدم اعتماد به افراد و هراس از محیط و در سطح نشانه شناسی تقابل نشانه‌هایی همچون: لولی/ آواره، ترسا/ ارمنی، جام/ شیشه و مانند آن، از موارد مشترک در دو اثر است. اما در سطح تأویل معنایی نشانه هایی که شعر اخوان را تأویل پذیر کرده، بسیار روشن تر از شعر پرتو است. هر چند دو بیت از سرودۀ پرتو نیز امکان تأویل متن و هم‌خوانی با سروده اخوان را فراهم می سازد. وجه افتراق دو اثر، طراوت و طنز سروده پرتو در مقابل جدیت شعر اخوان است.

There has been an interaction between postmodern fiction and science fiction since the emergence of postmodern tendencies in literature. Postmodern authors’ willingness to incorporate elements from science fiction differentiates them from their Victorian realist and modernist predecessors, who did not include science fiction tropes and motifs in their novels. The shift from indifference to interest towards science fiction in British literature requires a thorough analysis. As such, this thesis first gives information about the histories and definitions of postmodernism and science fiction, and then investigates the exchanges between postmodern fiction and science fiction by making references to the studies of scholars and critics who also focus on this subject.

As examples of the appropriation of science fiction elements in postmodern fiction, this thesis analyzes Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods. It examines the employment of spatiotemporal science fiction motifs such as future-world, (post)apocalypse, space travel, and various science-fictional technologies in both novels. Ultimately, it argues that science
fiction elements are appropriated in The Passion of New Eve and The Stone Gods because they provide the best means for making postmodern interrogations of timespace, progress metanarratives, social norms, and traditional dichotomies.

Key words: postmodernism, postmodern novel, science fiction, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, The Passion of New Eve, The Stone Gods

This chapter examines recent changes in the treatment of time and temporality – past, present and future – in the work of Jeanette Winterson. Since she first started writing, Winterson’s work has corresponded closely with queer theory and lesbian and gay studies, and like many canonical queer theorists, Winterson repeatedly questions the concept of time and the writing of history. Her fiction not merely challenges sexual and gender difference, but collapses the divide between past and present to create an interstitial space where empowering experiences abound and significant encounters may grow and prosper. Recently, and especially in The Stone Gods, Winterson’s interstitial space has acquired a more fatalistic tone, circulating around a sense of finality and impending doom. This chapter argues that this reflects a more explicit nihilistic turn in critical and queer theory. Post-9/11 queer theory, like Winterson’s recent fiction, rejects reproductive continuance and circularity – and embraces temporal ends.