Experiment has always been present throughout the history of literature. For Joe Bray et al., “[e]xperiment is one of the engines of literary change and renewal; it is literature’s way of reinventing itself” (“Introduction” 1). By paying attention to the deployment of ekphrasis, as a crucial feature of literary experimentation in twenty-first-century fiction, this thesis looks into how it acts as a metafictional narrative technique that does not destabilise the ontological statuses of these fictive worlds in ways that are typical to postmodern fiction, even if it underlines the linguistic nature of artistic description. What underpins the thematic and formal characteristics of novels such as Ali Smith’s There but for there and How to be both, Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones, Deirdre Madden’s Authenticity, Molly Fox’s Birthday, Time Present and Time Past, and Max Porter’s Grief is a Thing with Feathers and Lanny is a self-conscious inquiry into why we read or how we read, as part of a broader meditation on why ‘art matters’. Ekphrastic descriptions in these novels also coincide with the intersections between language, time, as well as the temporal experience of reading. The representation of objective and subjective time is another preoccupation of twenty-first-century experimental fiction that is aligned with, as Peter Boxall observes, “the emergence of new kinds of realism, a new set of formal mechanisms with which to capture the real” (Twenty-First-Century 10). After all, these works straddle the boundaries between ‘realist’ and ‘experimental’, literary genres, as well as art forms. Central to these novels as well is the polyphony of voices and conversations between its characters that, likewise, engender dialogue between the work and reader. In this, I consider what is termed the dialogic aspects of these novels, and how they hinge on the reader’s active participation from both intellectual and affective standpoints.