The nouveau roman and Writing in Britain After Modernism recovers a neglected literary history. In the late 1950s, news began to arrive in Britain of a group of French writers who were remaking the form of the novel. In the work of Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, Robert Pinget, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Claude Simon, the hallmarks of novelistic writing—discernible characters, psychological depth, linear chronology—were discarded in favour of other aesthetic horizons. Transposed to Britain's highly polarized literary culture, the nouveau roman became a focal point for debates about the novel. For some, the nouveau roman represented an aberration, and a pernicious turn against the humanistic values that the novel embodied. For others, it provided a route out of the stultifying conventionality and conformism that had taken root in British letters. On both sides, one question persisted: given the innovations of interwar modernism, to what extent was the nouveau roman actually new? This book begins by drawing on publishers' archives and hitherto undocumented sources from a wide range of periodicals to show how the nouveau roman was mediated to the British public. Of central importance here is the publisher Calder & Boyars, and its belief that the nouveau roman could be enjoyed by a mass public. The book then moves onto literary responses in Britain to the nouveau roman, focusing on questions of translation, realism, the end of empire, and the writing of the project. From the translations of Maria Jolas, through to the hostile responses of the circle around C. P. Snow, and onto the literary debts expressed in novels by Brian W. Aldiss, Christine Brooke-Rose, Eva Figes, B. S. Johnson, Alan Sheridan, Muriel Spark, and Denis Williams, the nouveau roman is shown to be a central concern in the postwar British literary field.

The Nouveau Roman writers have been actively involved in the theory as well as the practice of fiction, participating in a series of vigorous debates on issues such as the political significance of literature, formalism and structuralism, the status of the author, etc. This study discusses Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, Simon, Butor and Ricardou, analysing both the interaction of their own theory and fiction and their reactions to the work of figures such as Sartre, Barthes, Lvi-Strauss, Sollers and Kristeva.

It is easy simply to attribute the high profile of Sollers, the numerous autobiographical details in his novels, and also the espousal of so many different views and causes, to egocentrism and opportunism. Alternatively, one could say that they are all significant elements in an ongoing enquiry into the role of fiction in a society where attitudes are often thought to be determined more by images than by the written word. Given Sollers's questioning of society's conventional images (as in Debord's notion of the 'spectacle'), his awareness of his own role in the media, and his interest in developing a discourse on the visual arts, how do such concerns come together to create new forms of fiction and a coherent aesthetics? These seemingly disparate questions are all in fact related to Sollers's desire to challenge the accepted parameters of representation by creating an alternative scene in the novel, a subject which forms the basis of this book.

This volume provides lively and clearly written expositions of those figures who have done most to shape our views in the period since 1914. Music, cinema, drama, art, fiction, poetry and philosophy are just some of the fields covered

This text provides an excellent introduction and overview of Narratology, a rapidly growing field in the humanities. Literary narratologists have provided many key concepts and analytical tools which are widely used in the interdisciplinary analysis of such narrative features as plot, point of view, speech presentation, ideological perspective and interpretation. The introduction explains the central concepts of narratology, their historical development, and draws together contemporary trends from many different disciplines into common focus. It offers a compendium of the development of narratology from classical poetics to the present. The essays are all prefaced by individual forewords helping the reader to place each individual selection in context. Recent developments are assessed across disciplines, highlighting the mutual influences of narratology and deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, film and media studies.

This volume offers a unique and valuable insight into the novel in French over the past two centuries. In a series of essays, acknowledged experts discuss a variety of topics including nineteenth-century realism, women and fiction, popular fiction, experiment and innovation, war and the Holocaust, the Francophone novel, and postmodern fiction. They offer a challenging reassessment of major figures, while deliberately reading traditional views of literary history against the grain. Theoretical discussion is combined with close reading of texts and exploration of context, comparison with other genres and other literatures, and reference to novels from earlier periods. This companionable introduction includes a chronology and guide to further reading. From it emerges a strong sense of the vitality and energy of the modern French novel, and of the debates surrounding it.

Juan Goytisolo is arguably Spain’s foremost contemporary novelist. This book is one of the few major studies in English to examine all of his mature works, from Señas de identidad in 1966 to Las semanas del jardín, published in 1997. It focuses on the interface between the thematic content of the novels and its formal expression, viewing this as the crucial nexus of their meaning. Goytisolo’s writing is, in his own words, a ‘commitment of myself ... for a transformation of the world’. The Poetics of Contagion dissects the nature of the relationship between writer and reader to show how Goytisolo’s political commitment is reflected in his work.

The essays in this collection are based on papers given at a conference on detective fiction in European culture, held at the University of Exeter in September 1997. The range of topics covered is designed to show not only the presence and variety of narratives of detection across different European countries and their different media (although there is a predictable emphasis on the novel). It also illustrates the fertility of the genre, its openness to a spectrum of readings with different emphases, formal as well as thematic. Approaches to detective fiction have often tended to confine them-selves to ‘symptomatic’ interpretation, where details of the fictional world represented are used to diagnose a specific set of social preoccupations and priorities operative at the time of writing. Such approaches can yield valuable insights. Nonetheless there is a risk of limiting the value of the genre as a whole solely to its role as a mirror held up to society. In this perspective, issues of structure and style are sidelined, or, if addressed, are praised to the extent that they approach invisibility — concision, spareness, realism are the qualities singled out for praise. The genre also gives much scope for formal innovation — and indeed has often attracted already established ‘mainstream’ writers and filmmakers for just this reason. The eclectic diversity of the detective narratives considered in this volume reveal the malleability of the traditional constraints of the genre. The essays bear rich testimony to the value of considering the interplay of thematic and structural issues, even in the most apparently unselfconscious and popular (or populist) forms of narrative. The patterns of reassurance, the triumph of intellect and the ordered, rational world ‘of old’ are now challenged by the need to foreground the problems, ambiguities and uncertainties of the self and of society. The plurality of meanings and the antithetical imperatives explored in these detective narratives confirm that the most recent forms of the genre are not mere palimpsests of their ‘golden age’ precursors. The subversion of traditional expectations and the implementation of diverse stylistic devices take the genre beyond mere homage and pastiche. The role of the reader/spectator and critic in conferring meaning is a crucial one.

Juan Goytisolo is arguably Spain’s foremost contemporary novelist. This book is one of the few major studies in English to examine all of his mature works, from Señas de identidad in 1966 to Las semanas del jardín, published in 1997. It focuses on the interface between the thematic content of the novels and its formal expression, viewing this as the crucial nexus of their meaning. Goytisolo’s writing is, in his own words, a "commitment of myself ... for a transformation of the world". The Poetics of Contagion dissects the nature of the relationship between writer and reader to show how Goytisolo’s political commitment is reflected in his work.