Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel

In the decades following the immediately postwar period in Britain a loose grouping of experimental writers that included Alan Burns Christine Brooke-Rose B. S. Johnson and Ann Quin worked against the dominance as they saw it of the realist novel of the literary mainstream. <em>Late</em><br><em>Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel</em> reassesses the experimentalism versus realism debates of the period and finds a body of work engaged with rather than merely antagonistic towards the literary culture it sought to renovate. Charting these engagements it shows how they have significance<br>not just for our understanding of these decades but for the broader movement of the novel through the century. <p/>This volume takes some of the claims made about experimental fiction--that it is unreadable nonlinear elliptical errant plotless--and reimagines these descriptors as historically inscribed tendencies that express the period's investment in the idea of the accidental. These novels are interested<br>in the fleeting and the fugitive in discontinuity and shock. The experimental novel cultivates an interest in methods of representation that are oblique: attempting to conjure the world at an angle or in the rear-view mirror; by ellipsis or evasion. These concepts--error indeterminacy <br>uncertainty accident--all bear a relation to that which evades or resists interpretation and meaning. Asking what are the wider political ethical and philosophical correlates of this incommensurability <em>Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel </em>reads experimental literature in this light <br>as suffused with anxiety about its adequacy in the light of its status as necessarily imitative and derivative and therefore redolent of the forms of not-knowing and uncertainty that mark late modernism more generally.<br>