1In a scene from Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House (2017), a novel in which the eponymous family has severed all links with their past and reinvented themselves as cosmopolitans in New York, characters are discussing questions of language and philosophy, focusing on the word ‘transition’:

The first and most important word is transition. In music, a momentary modulation from one key to another. In physics, a change of an atom, nucleus, electron, etc., from one quantum state to another, with emission or absorption of radiation. In literature, a passage in a piece of writing that smoothly connects two topics or sections to each other. In the present case . . . in the present case, the process by which a person permanently adopts the outward or physical characteristics of the gender with which they identify, as opposed to those of the gender they were assigned at birth. (114; original emphasis)
‘Transition is like translation. You’re moving across from one language into another.’ (116)

2The conversation takes place as one of the protagonists is considering a gender transition, but the opening of the discussion illustrates the multiplicity of meanings attached to the term and suggests the wide scope of its applications. The list is not exhaustive however, and other fields in which the notion is deployed can be mentioned. In the social sciences, the concept of transition is used to describe processes of transformation between two relatively stable states—political systems, economic structures, social identities, demographic regimes, or cultural norms. In political science, the term ‘transitology’ was coined to designate the study of the systemic change process from authoritarian regimes to democratic ones while the field of Transitional Justice examines the legal, political, and ethical mechanisms through which societies confront the legacy of conflict in an attempt to move towards new institutional frameworks. In environmental and policy studies, the concept of sustainability transitions has emerged as a transdisciplinary research field concerned with the large-scale energy and ecological transformations required to move towards more sustainable economies. In ethnology, Arnold van Gennep argued in Les Rites de passage (1909) that rituals in various countries across the world are structured around three phases: separation, margin or limen (which corresponds to transition) and reincorporation. Participants first detach from a fixed social point, then enter an intermediate stage of liminality, before eventually reaching a stable state within a new social role. As British anthropologist Victor Turner later observed in his analysis of the Ndembu ethnic group in Zambia, during the transitional phase, individuals are ‘neither here nor there’: they are ‘threshold people’ who exist in a liminal state, ‘betwixt and between’ established social positions (95). In L’âge des transitions (2015), Belgian philosopher Pascal Chabot argues that while the wish for a revolution (which, etymologically, entails a return to an earlier condition but in practice suggests a break from the past) was at the core of social movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the contemporary world does not look for rupture or return as much as for transitions to new modes of living and being. He singles out three major transformations: energy transition, democratic transition and demographical transition.

3These various uses of the concept of transition resonate with the definition of the term in the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘a passing or passage from one condition, action, or (rarely) place, to another’. As such it connotes change but also captures in-betweenness since the process of transition unfolds between two points or stages. As was previously analysed in issue 59 of Études britanniques contemporaines in 2019, modernist, avant-garde and contemporary literature and visual arts can be viewed through the prism of the ‘revolution metaphor’ for the way they ‘radically redefined their relation to society and history’ (Bernard). They may also be considered through the subtler movements of transition which, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, have proved exhilarating for the aesthetic transformations they have generated against a backdrop of political, social and environmental realignments. Modernism thus emerged during a period of historical transition from Victorian and Edwardian stability to a prevailing sense of fragmentation and uncertainty, especially in the context of the First World War and the decline of the Empire. While Joseph Conrad pointed to the necessary transition away from the British imperial world in Heart of Darkness (1899) and E.M. Forster depicted social and cultural transitions in Howards End (1910), D.H. Lawrence portrayed modern society as a civilisation in transition which required new forms of connection and vitality, and T.S. Eliot stressed the shift to a fragmented cultural and spiritual landscape. In ‘The Second Coming’, W.B. Yeats imagined history moving through cyclical transformations while Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and James Joyce explored transitional moments in everyday life.

4From the perspective of the transition rather than the revolution metaphor, dissociations from earlier aesthetic traditions and legacies, together with shifts toward new forms suggest an ongoing negotiation with the past rather than a simple rupture from it. In 2002, the exhibition ‘Transition: The London Art Scene in the Fifties’ curated by Martin Harrison at the Barbican gallery reflected on the movements and ideas that flourished in the 1950s (Neo-Romanticism, Social Realism, Pop Art, the Kitchen Sink School, Abstract Expressionism) and showed the works of artists and designers living in London during that decade (including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff and David Hockney) who responded to the changing world (marked by the Cold War and the welfare state) with new forms based on mass media, collage, and new technology.

5Between 2018 and 2021, Cambridge University Press published five volumes of British Literature in Transition which, in twenty-year blocks, explore transitions in writing, performance, publication and readership from the fin de siècle to the new millennium, identifying currents of change but also of continuity. Each of these twenty-year periods is viewed as an ‘age of transition’ for reasons which are often related to historical and social conditions in Britain or internationally. In 1906, Arnold Bennett thus referred to the uncertainty created by ‘the intellectual, scientific, and technological transformations sweeping the world’ while G. K. Chesterton was exasperated by the persistence of the ‘age of transition’ over too many years (in Purdon 5). The interwar period was also seen as a time of transition during which British literatures and traditions shifted ‘under the pressure of . . . the political and social dilemmas of these exceptionally dramatic years’ (Ferrall and McNeill 5). According to Gill Plain in the third volume of the series, ‘one of the most influential literary transitions of the postwar period’ was ‘the emergence of black British voices and a postcolonial aesthetic’ (9) which ‘forces a consideration of transition less in temporal or aesthetic than in spatial terms’ (21), thereby challenging the emplotment of ‘a teleological narrative of transition’ (14). The editor of the volume for the years 1960–80 moves away from the idea of radical breaks and ‘clean incisions’ to focus on the effects of ‘under-currents and ripples; dwindlings, blendings and frail beginnings; absorptions, pauses and mistakes’ (McLoughlin 4). Likewise, the last two decades of the twentieth century are viewed less as ‘a period of rupture and revolution’ than as a time of ‘transitional continuity’ which the prefixes ‘post-’ and ‘neo-’ tend to encapsulate (Pollard and Schoene 5–6).

6In the new millennium, the evolving national imaginaries and rapidly transforming social identities have impacted artistic practices which have both registered these changes and shown sustained interest in transitional, liminal spaces. Rather than dwelling solely on points of departure and arrival, and thus relying on a linear and teleological conception of change, British writers and artists frequently explore interstices and zones of suspension where identities, narratives and aesthetic forms remain provisional and in a continuous process of becoming.

7The transitions represented in literature and the visual arts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries cover a large spectrum, from the depiction of gradual shifts in stages of life (childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age) to gender transition or hesitation (as in Brigid Brophy’s 1969 novel In Transit), from progressive changes in political, economic or ideological systems to situations depicted in migration, diaspora and refugee narratives when individuals move from one place, culture and language to another, and often find themselves in a liminal or transitional space. Stable identities are often debunked and the contours of the human and the non-human are challenged, pointing to a transition towards a ‘posthuman convergence’ which Rosi Braidotti sees as characteristic of the present historical condition marked by ‘momentous and interconnecting changes’ at the social, environmental and technological levels (4). In this moment of transition where the centrality of humans is being dislocated and where new materialism argues for a ‘natureculture’ continuum (Braidotti 11), writers and artists reflect on what it means to be human—a question which appears in the epigraph to Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005), taken from Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964): “what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science” (n.p.). 

8Donna Haraway has famously written about the figure of the cyborg which blurs the lines between the human and the machine but also between nature and culture, mind and body. Novels such as Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984), Michel Faber’s Under the Skin (2000), Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019) or Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021), to name just a few, explore such hybrid forms. In Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019), transgender character Ry Shelley offers a self-definition which draws attention to their hybridity: ‘I am liminal, cusping, in between, emerging, undecided, transitional, experimental, a start-up (or is it an upstart?) in my own life’ (29). Science-fiction is keen on exploring shifts between different ontological worlds as in Scottish writer Iain M. Banks’ novel Transition (2009) in which characters called ‘Transitionaries’ navigate between parallel realities. In English poet Luke Kennard’s dystopian debut novel The Transition (2017), a young middle-class couple saddled with debt is offered the opportunity to participate in The Transition programme where they learn about financial achievement and self-improvement from an older and more successful couple, whose aim is to discipline their transition into responsible adulthood.

9In addition to an interest in processes of transition in literature and the visual arts, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen a proliferation of ‘turns’ in the humanities (ethical, spatial, affective, material, posthuman etc.) which can be understood as epistemological transitions in the way knowledge is produced and interpreted. While the notion of ‘turn’ may seem to imply ‘a (radical) veering off from hitherto accepted intellectual practices’ (Eskin 558), what is taking place rather amounts to what could be called a ‘rearticulation and recontextualization’, ‘a displacement and refashioning’ (Eskin 560). To quote Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau who refer to the ‘new garb’ of ethics in literary studies which, since the 1990s, ‘have moved away from the prescriptive towards the more tentative and open’ (3), ‘we are less confronted with rupture than with continuities’ (6). Critics such as Martha Nussbaum or Derek Attridge, drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, are emblematic of the ethical turn and have developed the idea that literature creates ethical encounters with alterity. The spatial turn, which highlights the importance of space as a social product and draws on the work of Henri Lefebvre and Edward W. Soja, has influenced the way scholars analyse migration narratives and diasporic writing, while the affective turn (associated with Brian Massumi and Sara Ahmed, among others) and the material turn (linked, for instance, to Jane Bennett and Bruno Latour) have respectively stressed the value of interpreting literature and the visual arts through the prism of emotions and materiality. Each of these shifts displaces (rather than disavows) earlier interpretive paradigms and places the emphasis on new modes of attention: responsibility and alterity, spatial mobility, embodied affect, or the agency of matter. In this sense, contemporary criticism does not merely analyse transition as a thematic concern in literature and the arts; it performs a transition in its own epistemological orientation.

10The papers included in this issue of Études britanniques contemporaines address the notion of transition from a variety of perspectives: Katia Marcellin and Adrien Spiga explore the question of transition in the posthuman age; Amanda Benmouloud and Anne-Élise Pinzaru discuss the possibility of transition in a multicultural or transcultural Britain; Laurent Trèves exposes the illusory nature of transition which often fails to lead to a transformation; Tim Gupwell interprets transition from an intertextual perspective; Emma Roques analyses a transition in the discipline of art history.

11The posthuman is a particularly relevant topic when dealing with transition as the prefix ‘post-’ signals a reconfiguration whereby the very definition of the human is undergoing transformation. Katia Marcellin explores the transition towards a posthuman state through an examination of the in-between figure of the prosthesis in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) and Harry Parker’s essay Hybrid Humans: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Man and Machine (2022). Parker’s amputation transforms his sense of self and his prosthetic legs occupy a transitory space between his past life and his future hybrid self, while in Klara and the Sun, the sick child is expected after her death to be replaced (or ‘continued’) by a robot which will act as her physical prosthesis. These temporal transitions serve ontological ones as the definition of the human is blurred by the prosthetic devices which turn individuals and machines into hybrid beings. The text itself becomes a space of transition where readers are encouraged to empathise with the posthuman.

12Likewise, Adrien Spiga argues that Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019) performs a posthuman transition prompted by intimate interactions between human beings and machines. In a world in which anthropocentrism has been decentred, the posthuman is in a process of becoming and the contours of human identity are subject to change so that erotic relations between humans and androids can be considered conceivable. In McEwan’s novel, the machine named Adam transitions from the status of object to that of agent and lover, and provokes a shift in the male human protagonist whose sexual identity undergoes a transition towards homoerotic desire.

13A second set of articles explores the possibility of a transition towards a more harmonious life in transcultural Britain. Amanda Benmouloud analyses the transitory spaces in JJ Bola’s The Selfless Act of Breathing (2021) in which the British-Congolese homodiegetic narrator, who suffocates in London and suffers from racism, looks for a change in his life and goes to the United States where he hopes he might breathe better but also expects to die once he runs out of money. His trajectory (a transition from one place, one feeling, one condition to another, but also from life to expected death and then back to life) is examined through Paul Celan’s concept of Atemwende which refers to the ‘turning of the breath’, or the moment when breathing changes direction. The protagonist embraces this in-between, transitory experience which enables him to shift from despair to renewed hope.

14Anne-Élise Pinzaru examines novels by members or descendants of the Windrush generation, Sam Selvon, Caryl Phillips, Andrea Levy and Zadie Smith, to show how Britain oscillates between stasis, with the prevalence of seemingly fixed and deterministic aspects of British identity inherited from colonial models, and transformation as the country appears to be open to change through cultural interactions. While the multiculturalism promoted at the end of the 1990s as a means to shift away from the colonial past failed to produce the expected evolutions in British society which appeared to remain rooted in fixity, new perspectives were opened through what Mikhail Epstein called the ‘constructive deconstruction’ of transculturalism which rekindled a hope for change in Britain. Rather than dwell on cultural stagnation, the novels of Selvon, Phillips, Levy and Smith portray a country still in transition and capable of transformation.

15While Benmouloud and Pinzaru view transition as a potentially hopeful and positive process of change, Laurent Trèves counters this traditional interpretation in his analysis of Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under (2018), instead exploring the illusory nature of the concept. He argues that in Johnson’s novel, characters appear to be in a constant state of flux and metamorphosis, but fail to reach the stable stage or condition they are longing for after this in-between period of transition as they cannot escape their fate or their origins. Thus, Margot/Marcus undergoes a gender transition but their original identity keeps lingering, forbidding them from achieving a complete transformation; Gretel fails to detach from her mother and is inevitably brought back to her; myths are rewritten but remain fundamentally unchanged. Irresistible forces thus prevent the protagonists from becoming Other and trap them in a destiny over which they have no control.

16Transition may also be viewed from an intertextual or hypertextual perspective as the transformation of one text into another. This is Tim Gupwell’s approach as he examines the shifts from Lorenzo in Taos (1932), Mabel Dodge Luhan’s account of D.H. Lawrence’s time on her ranch in New Mexico, to Rachel Cusk’s novel Second Place (2021), a contemporary rewriting of the earlier work which borrows factual elements from Luhan’s book but also draws on Lawrence’s ideas on conquest, will and freedom to provide new personal reflections on them. While Cusk said she wrote Second Place to get Lawrence out of her life, the novel reveals the writer’s persistent influence so that what prevails is less a rupture than a transformation as the neo-modernist Cusk adapts Lawrence’s concerns and key ideas to the contemporary world.

17Transitions also take place within disciplines and Emma Roques analyses the role of the Women’s Art History Collective (WAHC) founded in 1973 in initiating a transition away from male-dominated narratives towards a British feminist art history. Taking into account the marginalisation of women artists in institutional spheres, the members of the collective advocated for a reshaping of the way the discipline of art history was conceived, practised and taught. While referring to the various actions implemented by WAHC, including feminist activism, reflection groups, contributions to feminist magazines and the excavation of women artists of the past, Emma Roques argues that their movement, which adhered to the methods and analyses of New Art History, achieved a transition towards more inclusive approaches rather than the radical revolution they were aiming for.

18This issue of Études britanniques contemporaines also includes two papers in the varia section. Susana Onega’s article on Sarah Hall’s Mrs Fox (2013)—a postfeminist rewriting of David Garnett’s patriarchal novel Lady into Fox (1922) and of the topos of human-to-animal transformation, but also a hypertext of Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth (1917)—resonates with earlier reflections on the posthuman and on intertextuality. Onega reads Hall’s novella through the prism of new materialism and critical posthumanism to argue that the woman’s transformation into a fox or ‘becoming animal’ (to quote Deleuze and Guattari) reveals the agency of her ‘vibrant corporal matter’ (Bennett) as she veers away from submissive domesticity and wilfully reconnects with nature, thereby challenging the conventional dualities of human-animal or nature-culture.

19Cédric Courtois examines how Yrsa Daley-Ward’s The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir (2018) places the genre of life writing under formal pressure by reconfiguring the memoir away from the conventions of Western autobiography. He shows how Daley-Ward performs a decolonisation of life writing which implies a decentring of Western norms of selfhood, temporality and knowledge to accommodate new forms. The Terrible thus both points to the invisibilisation of Black women in literary and cultural spaces, and offers new means of self-expression through a destabilisation of the autobiographical pact. Formal disturbance and fragmentation (in terms of narrative voice and structure, literary genre and modes of address) are deployed to try and convey more adequately experiences marked by racialised, gendered and traumatic precarity which cannot be contained within conventional frames.