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This book, first published in 1984, is based on readings of the novels of three major representative practitioners of the nouveau roman. Since its beginnings in the 1950s the nouveau roman has posed a major challenge to the theory of the novel because its practitioners claimed to have jettisoned the mainstays of nineteenth-century fiction: plot, character and the representation of reality. Consequently the nouveau roman has tended to generate radical or even subversive theories of the novel which have little to contribute to our understanding of the main stream of the genre. In this study, Ann Jefferson reassesses the theoretical implications of the nouveau roman and the terms in which fiction is generally defined, in order to demonstrate that the nouveau roman, far from being anti-fiction, is both profoundly novelistic and extremely instructive about the nature of fiction in general.
The nouveau roman and Writing in Britain After Modernism recovers a neglected literary history. In the late 1950s, news began to arrive in Britain of a group of French writers who were remaking the form of the novel. In the work of Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, Robert Pinget, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Claude Simon, the hallmarks of novelistic writing—discernible characters, psychological depth, linear chronology—were discarded in favour of other aesthetic horizons. Transposed to Britain's highly polarized literary culture, the nouveau roman became a focal point for debates about the novel. For some, the nouveau roman represented an aberration, and a pernicious turn against the humanistic values that the novel embodied. For others, it provided a route out of the stultifying conventionality and conformism that had taken root in British letters. On both sides, one question persisted: given the innovations of interwar modernism, to what extent was the nouveau roman actually new? This book begins by drawing on publishers' archives and hitherto undocumented sources from a wide range of periodicals to show how the nouveau roman was mediated to the British public. Of central importance here is the publisher Calder & Boyars, and its belief that the nouveau roman could be enjoyed by a mass public. The book then moves onto literary responses in Britain to the nouveau roman, focusing on questions of translation, realism, the end of empire, and the writing of the project. From the translations of Maria Jolas, through to the hostile responses of the circle around C. P. Snow, and onto the literary debts expressed in novels by Brian W. Aldiss, Christine Brooke-Rose, Eva Figes, B. S. Johnson, Alan Sheridan, Muriel Spark, and Denis Williams, the nouveau roman is shown to be a central concern in the postwar British literary field.
It is easy simply to attribute the high profile of Sollers, the numerous autobiographical details in his novels, and also the espousal of so many different views and causes, to egocentrism and opportunism. Alternatively, one could say that they are all significant elements in an ongoing enquiry into the role of fiction in a society where attitudes are often thought to be determined more by images than by the written word. Given Sollers's questioning of society's conventional images (as in Debord's notion of the 'spectacle'), his awareness of his own role in the media, and his interest in developing a discourse on the visual arts, how do such concerns come together to create new forms of fiction and a coherent aesthetics? These seemingly disparate questions are all in fact related to Sollers's desire to challenge the accepted parameters of representation by creating an alternative scene in the novel, a subject which forms the basis of this book.
In this work an alternative tradition in fiction is played off against the mainstream novel, genre conventions, reader expectations, and the audience's worldview.