This thesis offers an alternative history of contemporary British fiction by centralizing the conception of genre as a 'way of seeing and conceptualizing the world. By recontextualizing and reintroducing the polyphonic novel as a distinctive, emergent (cf. Williams) genre that mediates the contradictions of neoliberal individualism and its cultural manifestation, postmodernism, this thesis offers a distinctive perspective on cultural diversity and social fragmentation in contemporary Britain and aims to complement aesthetic and postmodernist literary histories that prioritize diversity.<eng>
