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‘Artfulness’ provides a new perspective on contemporary esthetics which uses Ali Smith’s  Artful  as both a conceptual resource and primary text to correspond to recent developments in experimental fiction. Alongside  Artful , Max Porter’s  Grief is the Thing with Feathers  and Eley Williams’s collection  Attrib and Other Stories  show how textual play can emphasize possibility and relationality beyond the esthetics of postmodernism. These texts are examples of an emergent wave of artful writers in the United Kingdom and beyond, whose self-conscious textuality explores the complexities of human connection across themes of grief, love, and miscommunication. By focalizing on the connective possibilities of artifice through wordplay, metafiction, and intertextuality, these texts are emblematic of a new form of literary innovation with an ethics of care that allows readers “to imagine an unreal different world but also a real different world” ( Artful  188). Drawing upon a range of current research on contemporary literature, critical theory, and intertextual sources, this article recognizes a new genre of thematically and formally precarious writing. This emergent mode of artfulness has the potential to reorient discussions of experimental literature toward compassion and empathy beyond and through self-conscious artifice.

Artfulness: Intertextuality, Wordplay, and Precariousness in Contemporary Experimental Fiction