The nouveau roman and Writing in Britain After Modernism

Abstract

This book shows the centrality of the nouveau roman to the literary culture of postwar Britain. Emerging in the mid–late 1950s in France, the nouveau roman grouped together a range of writers committed to innovation in the novel, such as Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, Robert Pinget, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Claude Simon. Transferred to a different national context, the nouveau roman became a focal point for debates in Britain about realism, modernism, and the end of empire. The nouveau roman and the Novel in Britain After Modernism draws on extensive research into archival and periodical sources in order to tell the story of the nouveau roman’s dissemination and reception in Britain. It also looks at postwar writers working in Britain so as to gauge the impact of the nouveau roman in novels of the 1960s and 1970s. Whether in translations of Nathalie Sarraute’s writing by Maria Jolas (one of the founders of the interwar little magazine transition), or in the conservative critiques of the nouveau roman levelled by the circle around C. P. Snow, the question of the legacies of European high modernism is always in view. But equally, for writers like Brian W. Aldiss, Christine Brooke-Rose, Eva Figes, B. S. Johnson, Alan Sheridan, Muriel Spark, and Denis Williams, the nouveau roman also provided the source of aesthetic innovations that could exceed the modernist account of the new. This book uncovers a neglected history of the postwar British literary field, with continuing relevance for contemporary innovative writing.