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Ever since Ezra Pound's exhortation to 'make it new', experimentation has been a hallmark of contemporary literature. Ranging from the modernists, through the Beats to postmodernism and contemporary 'hyperfiction', this is a unique introduction to experimental fiction. Creative exercises throughout the book help students grapple with the many varieties of experimental fiction for themselves, deepening their understanding of these many forms and developing their own writing skills. In addition, the book examines the historical contexts and major themes of 20th-century experimental fiction and new directions for the novel offered by writers such as David Shields and Zadie Smith. Making often difficult works accessible for the first time reader and with extensive further reading guides, Experimental Fiction is an essential practical guidebook for students of creative writing and contemporary fiction. Writers covered include: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Ralph Ellison, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Gibson, Italo Calvino, Jeanette Winterson, Don Delillo, Caitlin Fisher, Geoff Ryeman, Xiaolu Guo, Tom McCarthy, James Frey and David Mitchell.
What is experimental literature? How has experimentation affected the course of literary history, and how is it shaping literary expression today? Literary experiment has always been diverse and challenging, but never more so than in our age of digital media and social networking, when the very category of the literary is coming under intense pressure. How will literature reconfigure itself in the future? The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature maps this expansive and multifaceted field, with essays on: the history of literary experiment from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present the impact of new media on literature, including multimodal literature, digital fictio...
Ever since Ezra Pound's exhortation to 'make it new', experimentation has been a hallmark of contemporary literature. Ranging from the modernists, through the Beats to postmodernism and contemporary 'hyperfiction', this is a unique introduction to experimental fiction. Creative exercises throughout the book help students grapple with the many varieties of experimental fiction for themselves, deepening their understanding of these many forms and developing their own writing skills. In addition, the book examines the historical contexts and major themes of 20th-century experimental fiction and new directions for the novel offered by writers such as David Shields and Zadie Smith. Making often difficult works accessible for the first time reader and with extensive further reading guides, Experimental Fiction is an essential practical guidebook for students of creative writing and contemporary fiction. Writers covered include: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Ralph Ellison, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Gibson, Italo Calvino, Jeanette Winterson, Don Delillo, Caitlin Fisher, Geoff Ryeman, Xiaolu Guo, Tom McCarthy, James Frey and David Mitchell.
In the three decades following Stalin's death, major underground Russian writers have subverted Soviet ideology by using parody to draw attention to its basis in utopian thought. Referring to utopian writing as diverse as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, and Orwell's Animal Farm, they have tested notions of truth, reality, and representation. They have gone beyond their precursors by experimenting with the tensions between ludic and didactic art. Edith Clowes explores these "meta-utopian" narratives, which address a wide range of attitudes toward utopia, to expose the challenge that literary play poses to dogmatism and to elucidate the sense of renewal it can bri...
The Experimental Novel (1880) is an essay by French author Émile Zola. Written at the height of his career as a leading proponent of Naturalism, The Experimental Novel serves to illuminate the author's approach to the practice and purpose of writing while advocating for a revolution of style among artists of his era. Read as a reaction against Romanticism, The Experimental Novel proves a convincing counterpoint to the excesses and failures of nineteenth century art, illustrating the need for literature to draw inspiration from other sources of human understanding--such as science, history, and the social sciences--in order to effectively explore the themes of everyday life. "The return to n...
In a literary world where we see the constant rush of lemmings diving gleefully off cliffs into the seas of mediocrity and convention, it is refreshing to find that there are creative writers out there who are willing to keep the lighthouse of the avant-garde lit. In this collection one finds fiction fulfilling its core purposes: to warn, to enlighten, to illuminate. As editor Eckhard Gerdes says in his foreword, if you're looking for conventions, buy yourself a fez! What you'll find here is thought-provoking and emotive work, charged with the spirit of delight and wonder as each new possibility is uncovered. This is, without a doubt, some of the best writing of our times. The works in this collection can rub elbows with the great and hold their own. If there is an afterlife, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Richard Brautigan, Italo Calvino, Laurence Sterne, Donald Barthelme, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Samuel Beckett, Kenneth Patchen, and Eugene Ionesco are all looking at this work and are nodding and smiling.
This volume argues that postwar writers queer the affective relations of reading through experiments with literary form. Tyler Bradway conceptualizes “bad reading” as an affective politics that stimulates queer relations of erotic and political belonging in the event of reading. These incipiently social relations press back against legal, economic, and discursive forces that reduce queerness into a mode of individuality. Each chapter traces the affective politics of bad reading against moments when queer relationality is prohibited, obstructed, or destroyed—from the pre-Stonewall literary obscenity debates, through the AIDS crisis, to the emergence of neoliberal homonormativity and the...
The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature maps this expansive and multifaceted field, with essays on: the history of literary experiment from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present the impact of new media on literature, including multimodal literature, digital fiction and code poetry the development of experimental genres from graphic narratives and found poetry through to gaming and interactive fiction experimental movements from Futurism and Surrealism to Postmodernism, Avant-Pop and Flarf. Shedding new light on often critically neglected terrain, the contributors introduce this vibrant area, define its current state, and offer exciting new perspectives on its future.