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The Post-War Experimental Novel: British and French Fiction, 1945-75
Paperback / softback
Main Details
Title |
The Post-War Experimental Novel: British and French Fiction, 1945-75
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Authors and Contributors |
By (author) Dr Andrew Hodgson
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Physical Properties |
Format:Paperback / softback | Pages:224 | Dimensions(mm): Height 234,Width 156 |
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Category/Genre | Literary studies - from c 1900 - Literary studies - fiction, novelists and prose writers |
ISBN/Barcode |
9781350226234
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Classifications | Dewey:823.91409 |
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Audience | Professional & Vocational | |
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Publishing Details |
Publisher |
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
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Imprint |
Bloomsbury Academic
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Publication Date |
25 March 2021 |
Publication Country |
United Kingdom
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Description
Delving into how the traumatic experience of the Second World War formed - or perhaps malformed - the post-war experimental novel, this book explores how the symbolic violence of post-war normalization warped societies' perception of reality. Andrew Hodgson explores how the novel was used by authors to attempt to communicate in such a climate, building a memorial space that has been omitted from literatures and societies of the post-war period. Hodgson investigates this space as it is portrayed in experimental modern British and French fiction, considering themes of amnesia, myopia, delusion and dementia. Such themes 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 shuffled 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 legitimizes the form as a prominent presence within a wider literary and historical movement in European and American avant-garde literatures.
Author Biography
Andrew Hodgson is Postdoctoral Teaching and Research Fellow in British Literature, Universite Paris Est, France and Associate Doctor in Comparative Literature at Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon, France.
ReviewsAndrew Hodgson's The Post-War Experimental Novel brings much needed visibility to a body of work too often historicized as a literary dead zone between the monoliths of modernism and postmodernism. * Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature *
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