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The article argues that, while the configuration of the lesbian body and of subjectivity in Sarah Waters's first three novels—Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999), and Fingersmith (2003)—is carried out in the discursive and performative terms of postmodernist feminism, her latest novels evince a move towards a queer phenomenological position characterised by a growing interest in the material and socioeconomic conditions of the body and subjectivity. Initiated in The Night Watch (2006) and The Little Stranger (2009), and culminating in The Paying Guests (2014), this phenomenological turn is observable in that these novels are centrally concerned with material issues of class and situated in periods of collective post-war trauma and political unrest that open up the possibility for cultural change and social transformation, thus suggesting a move towards a transmodernist position. The article offers a queer reading of The Paying Guests, based on Sarah Ahmed's notions of "encounter" and "orientation" as a way to substantiate this assertion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the premise that human knowledge develops in terms of paradigm shifts, the article draws attention to the problems caused by the demise of transcendent knowledge after the Newtonian paradigm shift. By the turn of the twentieth century, the ensuing ideology of endless progress, unfettered by emotional, affective and imaginative knowledge, brought about a split of cognitive cohesion observable in the increase of mental diseases and the birth of psychoanalysis. The trauma paradigm thus initiated an ‘ethical turn’ in the 1990s heralding a wider scientific and academic shift towards the recuperation of holistic knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on historiographic metafiction in the context of postmodernist literature. Difference in criticisms on postmodernist literature; Discussion on the various types and trends in postmodernism; Analysis of the novels 'The Passion' and 'Hawksmoor.'