Chance and the Modern British Novel: From Henry Green to Iris Murdoch

(Paperback, NIPPOD)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Chance, and its representation in literature, has a long and problematic history. It is a vital aspect of the way we experience the world, and yet its function is frequently marginalised and downplayed.

Offering a new reading of the development of the novel during the mid-twentieth century, Jordan argues that this simple novelistic paradox became more pressing during a period in which chance became a cultural, scientific and literary preoccupation - through scientific developments such as quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, the influence of existential philosophy, the growth of gambling, and the uncertainty provoked by the Second World War.

In tracing the novel's representation of chance during this crucial period, we see both the development of the novel, and draw wider conclusions about the relationship between narrative and the contingent, the arbitrary and the uncertain. While the novel had historically rejected, marginalised or undermined chance, during this period it becomes a creative and welcome co-contributor to the novel's development, as writers such as Samuel Beckett, B.S. Johnson, Henry Green and Iris Murdoch show.

Reviews

"Julia Jordan has a keen eye for the paradoxes implicit in fiction's attempts to represent the workings of contingency, and in this lucid, eloquent study of chance in post-war British fiction she combines illuminating close readings of the work of such as Samuel Beckett, Henry Green, and B.S. Johnson, with thought-provoking analyses of changing attitudes to the random. The experimental nature of much of the best of post-war British fiction is too often air-brushed out of critical accounts of the period: this study forcefully demonstrates the way chance acted as a catalyst for the narrative innovations of a number of the era's most daring and influential writers." -- Professor Mark Ford, Department of English, University College London, UK
"Jordan's book offers a fresh and original polemic as well as a scholarly introduction to the role of chance in narrative. The topic has never been handled previously with as much awareness of the full range of philosophical issues it broaches, or with as much sensitivity to the full range of literary responses it is capable of eliciting." -- Rod Mengham, Reader in Modern English Literature, University of Cambridge, UK

Author Bio

Julia Jordan is a teaching fellow at University College London, UK.