Home - Cambridge Scholars Publishing

The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction since the 1960’s
Editor: Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau
Date Of Publication: Oct 2007
Isbn13: 9781847183125
Isbn: 1-84718-312-3
Some humanist critics contend that only realist texts have an ethical function, that there is no ethical message behind the parodic and self-conscious games played by experimental fiction and that, since emotion neutralises the ethical faculties, there is no ethical dimension in such excess-pedling postmodernist genres and modes as kitsch, melodrama and romance. Yet, one may argue that the defamiliarisation imposed by parody, metafictional overkill and sundry devices symptomatic of emotional paroxysm on the realist text involves some measure of criticism of received truth and makes for the practice of a non-deontic ethics of truths that is also fairly often an ethics of alterity. This volume examines analytical evidence for the ethical component in key experimental British novels from the 1960's to the present, with special focus on John Fowles, Brigid Brophy, B. S. Johnson, Angela Carter, Peter Ackroyd, A. S. Byatt, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Will Self, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes.

Susana Onega is Prof. of English Literature at the University of Zaragoza, (Spain). Her research focuses mainly on postmodernist British fiction and literary theory. She has written extensively on John Fowles, Peter Ackroyd, Jeanette Winterson, and Charles Palliser and written, edited or co-edited works on historiographic metafiction, narratology, intertextuality, ethics and trauma theory.

Jean-Michel Ganteau is Professor of English Literature at the University Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3 (France). He has a special interest in the ethics of affects (as manifest in such aesthetic resurgences and concretions as the baroque, kitsch, camp, melodrama and romance), and has published extensively on contemporary British novelists such as David Lodge, Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis and Jeanette Winterson.

Price Uk Gbp: 34.99
Price Us Usd: 52.99

Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)

We recommend

Cultural Studies
Art and Identity: Visual Culture, Politics and Religion in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Film and Theatre Studies
The Conformists: Creativity and Decadence in the Bulgarian Cinema 1945-89

Film and Theatre Studies
The People’s Pictures: National Lottery Funding and British Cinema

Interesting reviews

From Border States in the Work of Tom Mac Intyre: A Paleo-Postmodern Perspective

''Catriona Ryan has more than achieved what she set out to do.She has emphatically presented Tom Mac Intyre as a writer with a distinctive voice who not only provides a crucial link in the chain that goes back through Kavanagh to Yeats, but as a bridging figure, a transgressive author whose reflections on the Irish literary scene, and on writing more generally, have much to tell us about the ways in which constrictive critical currents can cut off living literary streams. It is clear from Catriona Ryan's painstaking excavation that Mac Intyre has been wrongly neglected. Her thoughtful and perceptive critical intervention will remedy that wrong.''
- Willy Maley, Litteraria Pragensia, 22:44 (2013), 131-134, p. 134.

“This is a critically independent piece of work that very much constructs and defines its own project, and maps an intellectual terrain of its own. It is an impressively original and also critically self-assured piece. It is marked by a sense of intellectual brio and also by the excitement of discovery.”
– Dr Steven Vine, Swansea University

“Since Tom Mac Intyre is a writer and dramatist who has received very little critical attention, this work intervenes in an under-researched area and offers an innovative and valuable extension of the frontier of knowledge in the field of Irish literary and dramatic studies.”
– Dr Aidan Arrowsmith, Manchester Metropolitan University