In the introduction I define the term ‘new audacity’ as the recent refusal of shame, silence, and a boldness in tackling difficult topics in life-writing by feminists. I introduce the authors I will be studying, define feminism for the project, and discuss the history of experimental feminist life-writing and new audacity’s precurssors. I also show how new audacity writing is different to French autofiction, new narrative, and the new sincerity, and provide a chapter summary.

In this chapter, I explore the representation of affect in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005) and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011). These texts, on first sight, seem to reflect a notably affectless narration, yet here I argue that this absence of affect is itself felt to be a crisis, one which the character or narrator struggles to recognise or articulate. In these comparable invocations of emotional removal, disregard and isolation, set in a contemporary context of high speed connection, these writers thus facilitate a new articulation of crisis within the global neoliberal order, making visible a return to elapsed and displaced actualities. They contribute, in this way, to what has been called a ‘new sincerity’ within twenty-first century writing, though their understandings of this project often highlight an ironic affective separation from immediate surroundings.

This chapter develops the book's argument that the postmodernist novel is defined by equally strongly felt imperatives to propitiate and renounce the market. It makes the case that, under these conditions, a degree of self-consciousness concerning a text’s market positioning – what the book defines as market metafiction – is always liable to arise. The chapter points to a series of examples of novels exhibiting this style of reflexivity, which demonstrate that recent texts in this mode give new visibility to techniques that have been evident in fiction for some decades. In the process, the chapter address four major – roughly historically sequential, though overlapping – tendencies in fiction shaped by the defining postmodernist double bind vis-à-vis the market. These are the "classic" or "high" metafiction of the 1960s and ’70s; the mid-’70s to mid-’90s phenomenon of “Avant-Pop” and related collisions of experimental and popular genre forms; the much-vaunted shift away from experimental postmodernism towards sincerity, “postirony,” and renewed forms of realism since the mid-1990s; and the widely discussed “genre turn” among “advanced” or “serious” novelists over the past decade.

This chapter develops the book's argument that the postmodernist novel is defined by equally strongly felt imperatives to propitiate and renounce the market. It makes the case that, under these conditions, a degree of self-consciousness concerning a text’s market positioning – what the book defines as market metafiction – is always liable to arise. The chapter points to a series of examples of novels exhibiting this style of reflexivity, which demonstrate that recent texts in this mode give new visibility to techniques that have been evident in fiction for some decades. In the process, the chapter address four major – roughly historically sequential, though overlapping – tendencies in fiction shaped by the defining postmodernist double bind vis-à-vis the market. These are the "classic" or "high" metafiction of the 1960s and ’70s; the mid-’70s to mid-’90s phenomenon of “Avant-Pop” and related collisions of experimental and popular genre forms; the much-vaunted shift away from experimental postmodernism towards sincerity, “postirony,” and renewed forms of realism since the mid-1990s; and the widely discussed “genre turn” among “advanced” or “serious” novelists over the past decade.