Reading the Multiple Drafts Novel

This essay outlines the formal characteristics and critical relevance of the “Multiple Drafts Novel,” a neuroscientifically-informed subgenre whose prominence is often obscured by the dominance of social and historical concerns in studies of contemporary British fiction. By reading a sequence of novels by Andrew Crumey, Tom McCarthy, and David Mitchell, alongside Daniel Dennett’s Multiple Drafts model of consciousness, this essay argues that a cognitively-informed analysis of the contemporary novel not only can reformulate our understanding of specific novels, but also can provide new perspectives on problems inherent within critical construction of literary postmodernism.