‘Such a Thing as Avant-Garde Has Ceased to Exist’: The Hidden Legacies of the British Experimental Novel

Abstract

The novel, once again, is caught in a tug of love. Forty-odd years after the ‘situation of the novel’ debates of the sixties and seventies, when academic éminences grises like Malcolm Bradbury, Bernard Bergonzi and David Lodge speculated upon the role of the novel after the unprecedented social and cultural transformations following the Second World War, the forms and functions of fiction are being deliberated anew, in response to the pressing ethical and political dilemmas of Anglo-American liberals — global economic recession, multiculturalism, the effects of globalisation and anxieties about human flourishing. We demand that this ancient and venerable tradition anthropologise our twenty-first century disaffection. We want this form, long privileged (or perhaps charged) with making sense of our lives and our selves, to provide the consolations of fiction against the existential angst of our age. Now, perhaps more than ever, we seek the easy, familiar pleasures of the text.