Forms of Modernist Fiction: Reading the Novel from James Joyce to Tom McCarthy

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.