Is literary theory naming a new literature? The inquiry produces a more interesting result than a uniform answer. Several recent studies seek to recover literature’s capacity to know the world, intervene in it or create relationships. Others warn that celebrating experience, presence and authenticity can deprive us of precisely what literary form enables us to think.

The verifiable novelty is not a shared doctrine. It is the coexistence of proposals reopening the question of what literature can do and through which procedures. This shift deserves attention without warranting a proclamation of a worldwide paradigm.

An international inquiry with explicit limits

Completed on 7 October 2026, this assessment examines eight books published between 2021 and 2026 and considers their relevance to discussions in 2026. It is not an inventory of every new title. It connects French criticism, studies of American fiction and comparative work incorporating non-Western traditions. The strong presence of English-language publishing is a limitation of the corpus, not evidence that other languages lack theoretical activity.

The inquiry uses publisher descriptions, contents lists, introductions and publicly accessible materials. Where only a description and contents list are available, we describe the book’s declared programme rather than pretending to have read it in full. Comparisons and objections are our own analysis. A recent book’s publication date does not necessarily date the ideas it develops.

Four distinct questions

We should distinguish the forms adopted by works, the knowledge they offer, their relationships with readers, and the institutions organising their circulation and value. Change at one level does not automatically transform the others. A theory of reading is not a school of novelists, and a political programme for the humanities does not by itself establish a new poetics.

Sincerity as a historical problem

In New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age (2024), Adam Kelly studies American writers whose careers began during the neoliberal hegemony of 1989–2008. He links sincerity with the market: how can expression be sustained when speech and feeling become commodities? The book consolidates an earlier debate; it does not establish that sincerity began in 2024. [1]

The methodological consequence is clear. Explicit emotion is insufficient to classify a novel as New Sincerity. We would need to examine how it engages the reader, handles suspicion and risks asking for trust. The absence of irony would be an inadequate criterion.

Realism as construction

Gabriele Lazzari’s New Global Realism (2024) compares novels in English, Italian, Kannada and Spanish. Totalisation becomes a formal method of representing inequality, with writers including Melchor, Bulawayo, Shanbhag and Bolaño. The proposal rejects necessarily naive realism: representing social reality can require a conscious construction of scales and connections. [2]

This supplies one of the clearest links with our article on novels. Its limit matters too: gathering writing within a comparative model does not establish that its authors form a school. A concept can be useful for reading without naming a collective identity.

Metamodernism and the postdigital condition

Spencer Jordan’s Metamodernism and the Postdigital in the Contemporary Novel (2024) examines digital technologies and novelistic forms. Its introduction connects economic transformations, perception, embodied experience and digital networks. Postdigital does not mean that digital technology has ended: it questions whether a division between digital and nondigital adequately describes experience. [3]

Vermeulen and Van den Akker’s earlier Notes on metamodernism (2010) confirms that the label is not newly invented. [4] Its value depends on what it distinguishes. If it includes every combination of emotion, irony and technology, it loses precision. If it identifies particular tensions and procedures, it can support productive comparisons.

A 2026 publication: metamodernisms in the plural

Glocal Metamodernisms: European Fiction after Postmodernism (2026), edited by Dennis Kersten, Paula Romero Polo and Usha Wilbers, compares European manifestations of metamodernism. Its description emphasises tensions between global frameworks and local contexts, including French, Spanish, Finnish, Italian, Dutch, British and Ukrainian perspectives. [10]

This book sharpens our finding: an organised critical proposal is indeed investigating what comes after postmodernism. Our reservation does not deny its existence. It questions the leap from a developed interpretive framework and European plurality to a universal school. The title’s plural is productive for our argument: it allows differences to be studied without erasing them.

Intervention: two different proposals

Alexandre Gefen’s L’idée de littérature (2021) traces a movement from aesthetic autonomy towards practices of intervention, relationship and inquiry. Its programme expands literature beyond the book and an exclusively linguistic definition. It addresses an understanding of literature rather than announcing a single new kind of novel. [5]

Caroline Levine’s The Activist Humanist (2023) proposes using formal analysis in collective action confronting the climate crisis. Infrastructure and effective intervention become central concerns. The focus shifts towards what researchers can do, rather than remaining exclusively with what works mean. [6]

Both proposals ask about the usefulness of literature and literary study, but they are not interchangeable. Our objection is that a work’s public relevance does not guarantee political effectiveness; conversely, effective action does not alone establish literary value. Confusing these criteria would impoverish the debate.

The objection of mediation

Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (2024) criticises a culture seeking to abolish mediation in favour of immediate experience. Her intervention requires us to distinguish attention to reality from the illusion of accessing it without construction. The return to experience therefore receives no unanimous theoretical endorsement. [7]

This objection prevents a comfortable story of reconciliation. A literature close to the world also needs distance, selection, composition and concepts. Mediation can be a condition of knowledge, rather than an obstacle to remove.

Revising the maps of global theory

The Routledge Companion to Global Comparative Literature (2025), edited by Zhang Longxi and Omid Azadibougar, questions comparative literature’s Eurocentrism through translation, institutions and circulation. Adding non-European examples to unchanged categories is insufficient: those categories and their hierarchies must themselves be examined. [8]

The consequence is substantial. “After postmodernism” may be useful in some contexts and poorly fitted to others. Before extending the question worldwide, we must ask whether the traditions being compared share a chronology and a set of problems. Internationalising a corpus does not automatically decentre the viewpoint.

An announcement is not a published book

Rita Felski’s Selective Affinities, announced for November 2026, remains outside the corpus of published books. Its editorial description proposes connecting literature, experience and recent German critical theory. We mention it as a development to follow, not as a book already read or proof of an accomplished transformation. [9]

A renewed debate without a common doctrine

The comparison identifies three requirements that intersect without merging: recovering literature’s cognitive and relational capacities; discussing its possibilities for intervention; and preserving formal mediation while reassessing geographical hierarchies. Their disagreement is part of the finding.

The hypothesis joining the two articles is intentionally limited: part of contemporary fiction and criticism is reopening the relationship between form and responsibility. Works continue to experiment, and theory does not speak with a single voice. What matters is the diversity of answers to a renewed question: how might literature help us know and inhabit a shared world?

Read the companion inquiry : After postmodernism: where is the contemporary novel heading?.

Sources and references

1. Adam Kelly (2024)
2. Gabriele Lazzari (2024)
3. Spencer Jordan (2024)
4. Vermeulen & Van den Akker (2010)
5. Alexandre Gefen (2021)
6. Caroline Levine (2023)
7. Anna Kornbluh (2024)
8. Zhang Longxi & Omid Azadibougar (2025)
9. Rita Felski (2026, forthcoming / à paraître / anunciado)
10. Kersten, Romero Polo & Wilbers (2026)

Further reading

For further reflection on defining literature and organising narrative, see Philip Bates’s Definir el fenómeno literario, volume I and volume II. These books are available in Spanish from Bubok: volume I and volume II.

Alba Longa’s The Architecture of Crime examines information, mystery and readers’ expectations in crime fiction. The English ebook is available on Payhip. These links extend the questions of form and knowledge discussed here; they do not present the catalogue’s books as evidence of a new movement.

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