This essay argues that the issue of what it means to live an authentic life in the twenty-first century has been a significant trope in recent British fiction. Negotiating between universalizing humanist perspectives and the radically individualizing politics of late-capitalist philosophy, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts pose the question of whether any authenticity of the self can be imagined in an increasingly globalized, mediated, and digitalized world. Contextualizing these novels within contemporary British writing, this essay locates a profound psychological anxiety as the dominant mode for engaging with authentic subjectification.

Trauma, celebrity, and killing in the 'contemporary murder leisure industry' 1 This essay examines the discursive interpenetration of trauma and celebrity culture, and, through an examination of the multiple killer in recent British writing and culture, locates the interest in both in the alienating otherness of the Real. Reading the work of Gordon Burn, David Peace and Rupert Thomson, the essay explores the semiotic crossover between the celebrity and the murderer as contemporary icons and situates both as symptoms of a pathological rewriting of subjectivity. The dynamics of trauma as a means of asserting a wounded and therefore meaningful self are addressed, and the narrative potential of repetition is highlighted. Underpinning the discussion is the figure of Myra Hindley whose image has proven a potent resource for artists and writers seeking to explore the uncomfortable attraction-in-repulsion of the 'celebrity' murderer.

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Contemporary culture is caught in a representational bind: fascinated by-and yet tired ofits tendency towards artifice and involution, whilst simultaneously attracted to-and yet sceptical of-the idea of the authentic. The hermeneutical confusion brought about by this self-identity crisis has given rise to a semiotic indistinction around artificiality and authenticity, leaving the observer trapped not by their bipolarity, but caught within their layers as they interleave. This essay explores the ramifications of this through an examination of the relationship between Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Will Self's Dorian: An Imitation (2002). Identifying the imitative intent of Self's rewrite as problematic, the essay situates the twentieth-century's shift towards an ethic of private authenticity over sincerity as indicative of a significant change in self and social understanding. However the demands and desires of late-capitalism have made it increasingly difficult to isolate what that authenticity might mean, and what credibility can be attached to it. By examining Self's portrayal of Princess Diana's life and death, it is argued that for all its importance as a signifier of value, contemporary authenticity is hopelessly caught within the representational order of the artificial.

This paper focuses on the ambiguous status of the half-chapter in Julian Barnes's novel A History of the World in 10'½ Chapters (1989). "Parenthesis" stands in contradistinction to the other ten chapters in that it offers a concerted riposte to the provisionality of postmodern history by installing love as a structuring logic by which the terrifying randomness of the past can be negotiated. Much of the distinctiveness of "Parenthesis" derives from the intrusion of an authorial-narratorial figuration of Julian Barnes which, it is argued, lends the half-chapter a degree of authorial privilege and narrative stability that is not evident elsewhere. By reading the 'honesty' of Barnes's discourse on love as a postmodern strategy of seduction, it is claimed that the redemptive potential of love as a way of making meaning from chaos is compromised. To recognise this is to face the prospect that Barnes lulls his readers into believing that "Parenthesis" offers an escape from the scepticism of postmodernism only to confront them with their own naive desire for order in narrative as in history.