Bloomsbury The Post-War Experimental Novel: British and French Fiction, 1945-75

The Post-War Experimental Novelconstructs 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 readers 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. Review Andrew 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 About the Author Andrew Hodgson teaches in French and Cultural Studies at University of London Institute in Paris, France.