Forms of Modernist Fiction - by Derek Attridge

About the Book

Innovative literary form examined from the point of view of the reader's experience

Book Synopsis

The formal innovations of the modernist novelists have continued to reverberate to the present day, less importantly as a matter of imitation and more as a stimulus to further innovation. Focusing on the experience of the reader in engaging with a selection of these works from around the globe, this book argues that a rigorous attention to formal features is crucial in appreciating their achievement and in understanding the impact of the early modernists on the history of the novel. Joyce's Ulysses is given particular attention for its feats of formal invention and as an inspiration for many later writers. Among the facets of modernist writing explored are the separation of content and form, the transgression of linguistic boundaries, the defiance of lexical and syntactic rules, the deployment realist techniques to present the unreal, the political significance of literary form, and the relation between formal innovation and affect.

Review Quotes

This important new work by Attridge is as ambitious in depth as it is impressive in breadth. [...] For students of modernism in general and Joycean scholars in particular, this book is indispensable.--G. E. Bender, SUNY Cortland "CHOICE"

With unsurpassed clarity and precision, Attridge leads us on a historically expansive tour of modernist innovation. Emphasising throughout the singular experiences of reading formal inventiveness, he offers an enriching account of how the affective and cognitive pleasures of criticism itself become intensified and diversified in response to some of the most challenging works of twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction.--David James, University of Birmingham