ABSTRACT
This article will analyse two of Ali Smith’s latest books, Artful (2012) and How to Be Both (2014), through the lenses of metamodernism and the return of the ‘real’ to fiction. It analyses the narrative strategies that are used to reintroduce the real into fiction, such as the purposeful and ambiguous blurring of generic boundaries and metamodern uses of intertextuality, ekphrasis and intermedi-ality. Moreover, this article will engage with the contrast between the ‘real’ in fiction and the ‘real’ as constituted by the World Wide Web. Ultimately, this article will claim that literature’s access to the ‘real’ does not reside in its attempts at mimetic representation but in its capacity to make ‘possible the imagining of possibilities’.
