The last decades have seen a revival of fragmentation in British and
American works of fiction that deny linearity, coherence and continuity
in favour of disruption, gaps and fissures. Authors such as Ali Smith,
David Mitchell and David Shields have sought new ways of representing
our global, media-saturated contemporary experience which differ from
modernist and postmodernist experimentations from which the writers
nevertheless draw inspiration. This volume aims to investigate some of
the most important contributions to fragmentary literature from British
and American writers since the 1990s, with a particular emphasis on
texts released in the twenty-first century. The chapters within examine
whether contemporary forms of literary fragmentation constitute a return
to the modernist episteme or the fragmented literature of exhaustion of
the 1960s, mark a continuity with postmodernist aesthetics or signal a
deviation from past models and an attempt to reflect today's accelerated
culture of social media and over-communication.
Contributors theorise and classify literary fragments, examine the
relationship between fragmentation and the Zeitgeist (influenced by
globalisation, media saturation and social networks), analyse the
mechanics of multimodal and multimedial fictions, and consider the
capacity of literary fragmentation to represent personal or collective
trauma and to address ethical concerns. They also investigate the ways
in which the architecture of the printed book is destabilised and how
aesthetic processes involving fragmentation, bricolage and/or collage
raise ontological, ethical and epistemological questions about the
globalised contemporary world we live in and its relation to the self
and the other. Besides the aforementioned authors, the volume makes
reference to the works of J. G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Mark Z.
Danielewski, David Markson, Jonathan Safran Foer, David Foster Wallace,
Jeanette Winterson and several others.
