The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction

A dominant but deeply undertheorized feature of serious contemporary writing is its fragmentary nature. This book powerfully, intelligently, and rigorously fills that lack (lack being, of course, what fragmentation is forever exploring).

David Shields

Professor at the University of Washington, author of 'Reality Hunger'

'The Poetics of Fragmentation' offers a wide-ranging and original exploration of the many forms and aims of fragmentation in contemporary fiction from Great Britain and the US. Reading the art of the fragment against a long history of literary experimentation with broken forms, collage and montage, it turns to some of the most prominent figures of contemporary fiction — from David Mitchell to David Foster Wallace, David Markson or Jeanette Winterson.

More than a panorama of contemporary fiction, the volume also offers a bracing reminder that fiction cannot be read in isolation from its cultural context. Essays devoted to the architecture of fiction, the impact of transmediality or the “shuffle narrative” also propose new readings of fiction’s inspiring capacity to constantly remediate itself.

'The Poetics of Fragmentation' will convince any reader passionate about contemporary fiction that experimentation remains an urgent concern of literature. Appropriating plural semiotic systems, from digital media to music, literature is still analyzed as pushing at the frontiers of it own language and one can only be grateful to the editors of the volume for making room for those often debated experimentations with multimodality ; an emphasis on multimodality that will no doubt appeal to a different set of readers.

A clearly-argued, erudite, efficient and well-paced volume that will offer many varied points of entry into the issue of fragmentation and that offers a welcome take on aesthetic categories that seemed to have lost some of their critical purchase.

Dr Catherine Bernard, Professor of British literature and art history,

Paris Diderot University, France

[…] This volume makes for a fascinating read, not only for academics interested in fragmentary fiction, but also for readers interested in contemporary literature in general. It provides the right balance between authoritative theoretical considerations, literature surveys and case studies or close(r) readings of individual works. While it does strive towards coalescence (and a very helpful impetus of imposing some order on the present information overload that plagues the reader of contemporary literature), it is also inclusive and generous in accommodating conflicting viewpoints and tendencies, much to the reader’s delight.

[Extract from book review appearing on the journal 'American, British and Canadian Studies', 2020, Vol.35 (1), p.173-176. Reviewer: Corina Selejan (Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania). https://intapi.sciendo.com/pdf/10.2478/abcsj-2020-0022 ]