The post-war experimental novel : British and French fiction, 1945-75 / Andrew Hodgson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hodgson, Andrew, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Experimental fiction, English--20th century--History and criticism.

Experimental fiction, English.

Experimental fiction, French--20th century--History and criticism.

Experimental fiction, French.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xi, 208 pages ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

London, UK ; New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.

Summary:

"The Post-War Experimental Novel constructs a topography of how the traumatic experience of the Second World War formed - or perhaps malformed - the post-war experimental novel. Focusing on British and French fiction, this book critiques how the aesthetic of symbolic violence became an empathetic means of communicating and building a memorial space omitted by literatures and societies of the post-war period. Themes of amnesia, myopia, delusion and dementia are constantly referred back to and posit in narrative a motive for the very broken forms these books often take - books in boxes, of spare pages to be shuffles at the reader's will; with holes in pages; missing whole sections of the alphabet; or books written and then entirely scrubbed out in smudged black ink. Covering the works of B. S. Johnson, Ann Quin, Georges Perec, Roland Topor, Raymond Queneau and others, Andrew Hodgson shows that there is method to the madness of experimental fiction and further legitimises the form as a prominent presence within a wider literary and historical movement in European and American avant-garde literatures"-- Provided by publisher.

The Post-War Experimental Novel constructs a topography of how the traumatic experience of the Second World War formed - or perhaps malformed - the post-war experimental novel. Focusing on British and French fiction, this book critiques how the aesthetic of symbolic violence became an empathetic means of communicating and building a memorial space omitted by literatures and societies of the post-war period. Themes of amnesia, myopia, delusion and dementia are constantly referred back to and posit in narrative a motive for the very broken forms these books often take - books in boxes, of spare pages to be shuffles at the reader's will; with holes in pages; missing whole sections of the alphabet; or books written and then entirely scrubbed out in smudged black ink. Covering the works of B. S. Johnson, Ann Quin, Georges Perec, Roland Topor, Raymond Queneau and others, Andrew Hodgson shows that there is method to the madness of experimental fiction and further legitimises the form as a prominent presence within a wider literary and historical movement in European and American avant-garde literatures.

Contents:

A critical moment

opening a space of discourse

On the literature of this study

Conflicts in cultural production

Historical contexts

The sense something is missing

Communal supplication, individual terraforming

Creating space in text

Babel, babble, xenoglossia and private language

Cut, shuffle, re-align, re-define.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781350076846

1350076848

OCLC:

1098218654