British Experimental Fiction

This paper examines the development of reflexive theories of fiction, and of self-conscious fictional writing, under the Modernist and early Post-modernist aesthetic in the early and mid 20th century, as many sophisticated novelists and theorists turned away from the realist-mimetic aesthetic towards more formal concerns. The development of metafiction and reflexive narrative is associated to the higher formal consciousness associated to formalist approaches to art and literature, the New Criticism and Structuralism, so that self-conscious art might almost be termed "the structuralist aesthetic."

New URL: <https://alluvium.bacls.org/2012/12/09/insurgent-subliteratures-fictions-of-resistance/>
This article was reviewed by Louis Armand at 3.a.m. Magazine in his article Lumpenproletariat Writing: Attack/Antisystem/Subliterature’ (https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/lumpenproletariat-writing-attackantisystemsubliterature/) and republished by Itchy Monkey Press (http://itchymonkeypress.com/2016/12/09/insurgent-subliteratures-fictions-of-resistance-by-mark-p-williams/).

New URL: <https://alluvium.bacls.org/2012/06/01/alternative-fictioneers/>
Outside of academic postmodernism, around the edges of genre fiction, and beyond the purview of the mainstream literary novel, is a culture of experimental British fiction which has been of increasing significance between the 1980s and the present: the alternative, the cult and the underground. The politics of these fictions are always radical and their defining aesthetics are characterised by excess and resistance to dominant culture, I will be addressing this milieu through two significant aesthetic tendencies: a decadent surrealist tendency and a pop-culture avant-gardism. I view these tendencies as critical visions of the relationship between national identity politics and dominant cultural politics within the culture of postmodernity. As described by Hardt and Negri in Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth, the dominant culture of postmodernity is the culture of globalisation; the alternative fictions I will address are formulating a critical relationship with the culture of globalisation in resistance to dominant national culture. [....]
FULL ARTICLE ONLINE

Foundation Special Section on Michael Moorcock and the SF New Wave edited by myself and Jacob Huntley (UEA) and based on the conference 'The Science Fiction "New Wave" at Fifty' (May-June 2014, University of East Anglia, UK). 
 
The special includes my previously unpublished interview with Moorcock from 2008 'All-Purpose Human Being'.

<http://itchymonkeypress.com/2016/12/08/literature-of-resistance-as-literal-resistance-by-mark-p-williams/> An essay on the experimental collective novel Seaton Point (1998) by Rob Colson, Martin Cooper, Ted Curtis, Robert Dellar, Keith Mallinson, Emma McElwee and Lucy Williams.
    "In 1997, seven people on an East London council estate decided to write a novel together that would be composed of stories based on their own lives and would appropriate the form of the novel to promote their circumstances and outlook. They produced the novel Seaton Point (1998), composed of intersecting stories of eccentric characters, vampirism, debt-collectors and demons, working-class culture and urban Gothic parody, set in and around a block of flats in Hackney - they published Seaton Point with a 'No Copyright' notice. 

It is a novel which resists many of the attributes of the postmodernist literary novel as we understand it.  Seaton Point demonstrates an interest in the performative quality of writing as an activity which produces its own logic; for the writers of Seaton Point, the collectivity and social activity informs every aspect of the text.  The authors of Seaton Point describe their text as ‘an inner-city tale of magic, mayhem and gratuitous sex scenes’ and wrote a provocative introduction in which they propose multi-author texts as an opposition to the cult of the author as originating genius of artistic work.  As an extension of this principle, the CIP page declared 'No Copyright.  Unauthorised reproduction, transmission, adaptation and circulation without the publisher’s prior consent are actively encouraged. Disks to facilitate this are available free of charge from the publisher.’"

Full article online; please follow the link to read more.

An investigation into B.S. Johnson's seminal experimental work 'The Unfortunates', and how the employment of a storyline concerned with illness interacts with the purposefully disordered narrative structure, and how each element enhances the novel's impact on the reader.