Dr%20Adam%20Guy: List of publications

With recent scholarship on sonic modernity as its background, this article turns to Dorothy Richardson (1873–1958), a writer highly attuned to auditory culture and the aural dimensions of experience. I look first at Richardson’s journalism, focusing on her writing on the American composer George Antheil, and her column for the early film periodical, Close Up, in which she reflects on the coming of sound to cinema. Moving then to her novel-sequence Pilgrimage, I consider her presentation of the new sound technologies of the telephone and the gramophone. In contrast to her modernist contemporaries, Richardson grants equal importance to the mediatory noise of the telephone and the gramophone as she does to the sounds these technologies were designed to transmit. For Richardson, mediatory noise becomes a conceptual locus as she takes soundings on the dynamics and permutations of mediation. To conclude, I look at the implications that Richardson’s interest in the noise of mediation has for modernist aesthetics in the novel.

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.

This volume views Lessing's writing as a whole and in retrospect, focusing on her innovative attempts to rework literary form to engage with the challenges thrown up by the sweeping historical changes through which she lived.

A collection of essays on the 1960s experimental writer B.S. Johnson, this book draws together new research on all aspects of his work, and, in tracing his connections to a wider circle of continental, British and American avant-garde ...