Criticism of British postmodern realist fiction has long been marked by an almost total disregard for ethics. The reason why critics investigating the anti-representational strategies characterizing the work of such writers as Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Graham Swift have for the most part remained silent about its ethical status is the widespread belief that ethics is incompatible with a questioning stance towards representation. The few academic critics who (claim to) have discovered some sort of ethical value in the self-reflexive, theoretically sophisticated fictions produced by these writers are liberal-humanists working in the Arnoldian-Leavisite tradition, who, in their search for moral truths, appear to be oblivious to specifically postmodern textual practices that block easy access to meaning. Taking its cue from the deconstructive type of ethical criticism that came to the fore in the 1990s, this article suggests an alternative to both the textualist neglect and the liberal-humanist misrecognition of the ethics of British postmodern realism. Through a reading of Graham Swift’s 1992 novel Ever After, it shows that postmodern realist fiction has an ethical dimension qua postmodern realist fiction; an ethical dimension that cannot be reduced to the promulgation of traditional moral values but rather has to be conceived as the elaboration of a post-humanist, non-foundational ethics of alterity.

Graham Swift’s writing space may be described as the liminal zone between modernity, with its now-discredited grand narratives, and a tentative and tantalizing postmodernity, to be created out of the debris of the past. Out of this World, Swift’s fourth novel, reflects on the part (to be) played by photographic and textual representation in mediating this critical transition. The aim of this article is to analyse this mediating process and to assess its ethical import at this particular historical juncture. It argues that the novel reveals the widely-held belief in the demystifying function of both photography and fiction to be complicitous with a dubious evasion of ethical responsibility, and that it puts forward the arduous and painful process of working through a traumatic reality as a precondition for the creation of a future which would be truly otherwise, not a stale repetition of the past but something radically new and as yet unimaginable.

Graham Swift’s debut novel The Sweet Shop Owner recounts the final day in the life of an ageing shopkeeper whose wife has died and who is estranged from his daughter. It diagnoses the demise of a way of life based on the principles of predictability, immobility and economic circularity. In my reading, the impasse in the narrative present is accounted for by the characters’ failure seriously to engage with trauma. The mechanisms of denial to which they take recourse prove inimical to life, and yet remain in place right until the end of the novel. Tantalizing flashes of an alternative modus vivendi are offered through the rebellion of the protagonist’s daughter against the oppressive regime imposed by her parents, but the suggestion that there is no possibility of achieving real change is at least equally prominent in the text. Envisaging the possibility of genuine renewal appears to be a deeply problematic undertaking. In exposing the ravages wreaked by a determined evasion of a catastrophic history, The Sweet Shop Owner inaugurates Swift’s search for a way of coming to terms with trauma that would create the conditions for the invention of a more humane, just and less destructive future, a quest which is taken up and doggedly pursued in the author’s later novels.

This article investigates different feminist positions on the contentious question of women’s autobiography through a critical reading of two key autobiographical texts from the interwar period, namely Jean Rhys’s novel Voyage in the Dark and Virginia Woolf’s memoir “A Sketch of the Past.” Whereas liberal-humanist feminists tend to regard autobiographical writing as an indispensable part of feminism’s emancipatory project, whose interests it allegedly furthers by inspiring a sense of female identification and solidarity, poststructuralist theorists accuse women’s autobiographies of harming the feminist cause by uncritically reiterating the patriarchal ideology of subjectivity-as-truth. My reading of Rhys’s and Woolf’s texts points up the need to negotiate a position in between the liberal-feminist and the poststructuralist stance on autobiography. A preliminary outline of such a position, which would avoid the twin pitfalls of voluntarism and determinism, is provided in the work of Rita Felski.