Between Hope and Despair: A Metamodernist Reading of Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain

Abstract

The turn of the twenty-first century saw a significant cultural and aesthetic transformation in literary fiction, moving from the irony and self-doubt that characterized postmodernist to a renewed engagement with honesty, emotion, and meaning. This transformation, which Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin Van den Akker examined under the metamodernist label, does not represent a naive return to the optimism of modernity, but an oscillation between hope and despair, honesty and irony, that determines the sensibility of contemporary cultural production. Based on foundational theorization of Vermeulen and Van den Akker, as well as extended to narrative fiction by Seshagiri and James, this article argues that the Booker Prize-winning Douglas Stuart novel, Shuggie Bain (2020), embodies a distinct metamodernist sensibility, specifically what this article calls the non-teleological ethical endurance: a pattern of commitment that continues without ensuring transformation, where care continues through disappointment cycles not because it ensures change, but because attachment, in itself, shapes a form of meaning. The analysis deals with three interrelated dimensions: the characterization of Agnes as a fluctuating character between ambition and collapse; Stuart's narrative voice as a site of post-cynical sincerity; and the novel’s reconstruction of meaning within the post-ideological and post-industrial landscape of Glasgow under the Thatcherite era. Thus, the article contributes to the growing body of metamodernist literary criticism while opening new critical prospects for Stuart's work, which has received considerable academic attention as social realism but has not yet been examined through a metamodernist lens.