ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the ways in which innovative writers are navigating the legacies of successive incursions of literary experimentation and considers the ways in which the innovative strategies of previous generations are being fruitfully deployed within new climates and to new ends. It looks at how contemporary writers are finding new ways to challenge the novel’s history. Perhaps the most notable instance of the re-emergence of past innovations in present-day literary fiction has been the growth of interest in literary modernism amongst novelists and critics alike. The troubled category of ‘literary fiction’ was judged to have fossilised into near self-parody. Demand for fiction in translation, which has long been an embarrassing blind spot in monolingual Anglophone literary cultures, is booming. In the resurgence of debates about the forms and functions of fiction, literary experiment has tended to be situated as an adjunct to concerns about the appropriateness of realistic writing for giving literary form to contemporary experience.
