Un-shaping matter : posthuman corporealities in contemporary British fiction

This thesis investigates the representation of posthuman corporeality in twenty-first-century British fiction through the works of Naomi Alderman, Jeanette Winterson, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Maggie Gee. While posthuman studies have frequently privileged speculative science fiction and North American contexts, this study argues that contemporary British literature offers a distinctive contribution by embedding posthuman concerns within recognisably British literary forms, including the condition-of-England novel and the novel of manners. At the same time, these texts reveal how the legacies of colonialism, technological modernity, and ecological crisis continue to shape contemporary understandings of embodiment. Methodologically, the thesis combines close textual analysis with insights from Critical Posthumanism, feminist and queer posthuman theory, ecocriticism, and new materialism. Rather than treating literary texts as illustrations of philosophical concepts, the study approaches them as sites of knowledge production capable of generating original reflections on the posthuman condition. Furthermore, the thesis develops the concept of palimpsestic corporeality to describe bodies as layered material formations continuously rewritten by ecotechnological forces. Through analyses of Alderman's electric bodies, Winterson's technocritique of digital substitution, Ishiguro's sympoietic ethics of care, and Gee's ecological imaginaries of deep time, the work argues that posthuman embodiment is characterised not by transcendence but by relationality, vulnerability, and continual becoming. It argues that contemporary British fiction reimagines the Posthuman not as the disappearance of the human, but as an invitation to inhabit embodiment differently within an increasingly interconnected world made of visible and invisible, organic and inorganic, human and non-human lifeforms. It includes interviews with Jeanette Winterson and Maggie Gee.