Ever since Ezra Pound's exhortation to 'make it new', experimentation has been a hallmark of contemporary literature. Ranging from the modernists, through the Beats to postmodernism and contemporary 'hyperfiction', this is a unique introduction to experimental fiction. Creative exercises throughout the book help students grapple with the many varieties of experimental fiction for themselves, deepening their understanding of these many forms and developing their own writing skills. In addition, the book examines the historical contexts and major themes of 20th-century experimental fiction and new directions for the novel offered by writers such as David Shields and Zadie Smith. Making often difficult works accessible for the first time reader and with extensive further reading guides, Experimental Fiction is an essential practical guidebook for students of creative writing and contemporary fiction. Writers covered include: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Ralph Ellison, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Gibson, Italo Calvino, Jeanette Winterson, Don Delillo, Caitlin Fisher, Geoff Ryeman, Xiaolu Guo, Tom McCarthy, James Frey and David Mitchell.

Ever since Ezra Pound's exhortation to 'make it new', experimentation has been a hallmark of contemporary literature. Ranging from the modernists, through the Beats to postmodernism and contemporary 'hyperfiction', this is a unique introduction to experimental fiction. Creative exercises throughout the book help students grapple with the many varieties of experimental fiction for themselves, deepening their understanding of these many forms and developing their own writing skills. In addition, the book examines the historical contexts and major themes of 20th-century experimental fiction and new directions for the novel offered by writers such as David Shields and Zadie Smith. Making often difficult works accessible for the first time reader and with extensive further reading guides, Experimental Fiction is an essential practical guidebook for students of creative writing and contemporary fiction. Writers covered include: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Ralph Ellison, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Gibson, Italo Calvino, Jeanette Winterson, Don Delillo, Caitlin Fisher, Geoff Ryeman, Xiaolu Guo, Tom McCarthy, James Frey and David Mitchell.

In the three decades following Stalin's death, major underground Russian writers have subverted Soviet ideology by using parody to draw attention to its basis in utopian thought. Referring to utopian writing as diverse as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, and Orwell's Animal Farm, they have tested notions of truth, reality, and representation. They have gone beyond their precursors by experimenting with the tensions between ludic and didactic art. Edith Clowes explores these "meta-utopian" narratives, which address a wide range of attitudes toward utopia, to expose the challenge that literary play poses to dogmatism and to elucidate the sense of renewal it can bring to social imagination. Using both structural analysis and reception theory, she introduces readers outside Russia to a fascinating body of literature that includes Aleksandr Zinoviev's The Yawning Heights, Abram Terts's Liubimov, Vladimir Voinovich's Moscow 2042, and Liudmila Petrushevskaia's "The New Robinsons.". Not advocating its own utopian alternative to current social realities, meta-utopian fiction investigates the function of a deep human impulse to imagine, project, and enforce alternative social orders. Clowes examines the technical innovations meta-utopian writers have made in style, image, and narrative structure that inform fresh modes of social imagination. Her analysis leads to an inquiry into the intended and real audiences of this fiction, and into the ways its authors try to move them toward more sophisticated social discourse. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Since the nineteenth century, the Western realistic novel has persistently represented the addict as a morally toxic force bent on destroying the institutions, practices, and ideologies that historically have connoted reason, order, civilization. Addiction, Representation undertakes an investigation into an alternative literary tradition that unsettles this limited portrayal of the addict. The book analyzes the practices and politics of reading the experimental addiction novel, and outlines both a practice and an ethics of reading that advocates for a more compassionate response to both diegetic and extra-diegetic addicts—an approach that, at its core, is focused on understanding.

In EXPERIMENTAL LITERATURE: A COLLECTION OF STATEMENTS thirty-four writers and critics reflect upon how literature puts itself to the test in an effort to make itself new. Those reflections assume very different shapes, and each approaches the question from a different angle. There are formalist readings here, and historicist readings; some contributors consider the politics of literature, others focus upon aesthetics; some statements deal with national traditions or periods, others are more synchronist. There are pieces on French theater, the Russian avant-garde, and performance in West Africa. There are meditations on poetry as a daily practice, on experiment as a way of knowing, on the restlessness of liminal spaces, and on the incommensurate dimensions of dream and reality. Each contribution is fueled by the notion that literature works best when it is willing to interrogate its own premises. Both individually and collectively, these analyses display an extraordinary mobility, one that does justice to the dynamism of experimental literature itself. Each essay engages its readers actively and thoughtfully, inviting us to participate in a conversation about literature's horizon of possibility, about what literature is and can be. Robert Coover, arguably the most distinguished living American experimentalist, contributes an afterword to this volume.