Subtexts: Essays on Fiction

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In reply to art critic Robert Hughes's famous question, "What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890?" the eight essays collected here ask not only what post-WW2 experimental fiction might lack that the avant-garde of Joyce, Stein & Pound apparently possessed, but rather what has it gained? Rejecting Hughes's nostalgia for a paradise lost, Subtexts explores a parallel world of daring, interlinked experimentation, at times evoking and at others cannibalising institutional Modernism, in pursuit of unforeseen horizons. Among the major authors whose works are addressed, are Kathy Acker, Christine Brooke-Rose, Mark Danielewski, Steve McCaffery, Iain Sinclair, Philippe Sollers, and representatives of the Oulipo & the Situationist International.