Forms of Modernist Fiction

Derek Attridge is Emeritus Professor in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York and Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author or editor of thirty books across a number of fields, including literary theory, South African literature, the history and forms of poetry and the work of James Joyce. His most recent publications are, as author, The Experience of Poetry: From Homer’s Listeners to Shakespeare’s Readers (2019) and The Work of Literature (2015) and, as co-editor, In a Province: Studies in the Writing of South Africa by Graham Pechey (2022), Literature and Event: Twenty-First Century Reformulations (2021) and The Work of Reading: Literary Criticism in the 21st Century (2021). He was the first recipient of the Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Prize and his book The Singularity of Literature won the European Society for the Study of English Prize for literary studies in 2006. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Leverhulme Research Professorship and fellowships at the Camargo Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, the National Humanities Centre and All Souls and St Catherine’s Colleges, Oxford. Before moving to York, he held posts at the universities of Oxford, Southampton, Strathclyde and at Rutgers University, New Jersey. Temporary positions have included Visiting Professorships in the USA, Italy, France, South Africa and Egypt.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: The Experience of Form: Joyce and After 1. Modernist Style in the Making: Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 2. Ulysses and the Question of Modernist Form 3. Nonlexical Onomatopoeia: Hearing the Noises of Ulysses 4. Joycean Pararealism: How to Read ‘Circe’ 5. After Finnegans Wake: Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker 6. The Event of Reading: Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable 7. Multilingualism and Translation: W. F. Hermans’s Nooit meer slapen 8. Afrikaans Modernism and the Anglophone Reader: Etienne van Heerden’s 30 nagte in Amsterdam 9. Crossings of Place and Time: Zoë Wicomb’s Fiction 10. Form and Content: Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries11. Reading and Choice: Ali Smith’s How to Be Both and Marlene van Niekerk’s Memorandum 12. Formal Innovation and Affect in the Contemporary Irish Novel: Kevin Barry, Mike McCormack, and Eimear McBride 13. Form, Politics, and Postcolonial Fiction: Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire14. Joycean Innovation Today: Tom McCarthy’s FictionWorks Cited Index

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.