Metamodern sensibility in Jenni Fagan's 'The Waken'

Jenni Fagan is a critically acclaimed author whose works explore marginalized girlhood in Scottish cultural contexts. "The Waken" depicts the story of a young girl brought up by a violent father on a Hebridean island in which a Stevensonian representation of evil acquires a feminist flavour. Through allusions to Stevenson's Gothic, Fagan draws on the antisyzygy element in Scottish literature but instead of reproducing an idea of duelling polarities within one entity, she uses binary oppositions in a polysyzygiacal way. This article shows that multiple alignments and plural connections of Fagan's polysyzygy indicate her text's participation in a metamodern sensibility. Creating a metamodern simultaneity in which a feminist deconstruction of patriarchal narratives coexists with the employment of the reconstructive potential of myth, Fagan's narrative presents a more dialogical approach to male literary traditions than the works of postmodern feminists.1