‘Experimentalism and the Novel in Irish, 1970–2000’ begins with the observation that, since the novel in Irish really only came into being in the first decade of the twentieth century, there is a sense in which all novels in the Irish language are, to some extent, experiments, and the timelines for experimentation in the Irish novel are more condensed than is the case with the novel in English. Novels had only been written in Irish for forty years when Brian Ó Nualláin wrote the surreal, heavily intertextual An Béal Bocht (1941). By the 1970s, sustained state and university support for Irish-language publishing meant that authors in the language were in a position to take risks with literary form, and, by the 1980s, many were actively engaging with ideas drawn from post-structuralism and postmodernism, resulting in novels such as Séamas Mac Annaidh’s Cuaifeach Mo Lon Dubh Buí (1983).

‘Maria Edgeworth, and the Novel as Education’ argues that we should consider most of Maria Edgeworth’s novels as ‘educational’, not in the sense of narrating an education as in a Bildungsroman or of having a didactic intent, but rather as making possible a certain kind of educational experience. Beginning with the book she co-authored with her father, Practical Education (1798), it is argued that in her successive works of fiction, from Castle Rackrent (1800) to Belinda (1801), Ennui (1809), The Absentee (1812), and Ormond (1816), her literary technique is a development of the earlier theory of education. Edgeworth’s fiction (particularly her Irish fiction) proceeds by a literary version of the Enlightenment method of discovery by experiment, in which the reader is invited to test out various hypotheses concerning characters and situations. The reading experience comes to be staged as a kind of educational game, for anyone ready to play.

This chapter reevaluates William Burroughs’ cut-up fictions through the lens of repetition, textual variation, and the limits of intertextual theory. Benoît Delaune argues that Burroughs’ compositional method – especially in The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express – exceeds traditional literary frameworks such as Kristeva’s intertextuality or Genette’s transtextuality. Drawing on the restored editions of Burroughs’ work and early collaborations like Minutes to Go, the chapter shows how Burroughs employed chance procedures alongside careful editorial strategy to create complex recursive networks of affective resonance. Rather than merely remixing texts, Burroughs generated a form of material autotextuality that destabilizes meaning, challenges linear reading, and undermines authorial intention. Through comparisons to avant-garde practices in music and poetry, Delaune situates Burroughs’ writing as a radical alternative to literary production – a practice that treats language as sensory and viral, foregrounding affect, repetition, and disruption over interpretation or reference.

This chapter explores key works by sculptor and painter Lygia Clark and author Clarice Lispector. The chapter notes that although these women came from very different backgrounds, with Clark a daughter of the Catholic provincial elite and Lispector arriving in Brazil as a penniless, Jewish refugee escaping the pogroms of Eastern Europe, their careers had similar trajectories and explored similar themes of female interiority. The chapter compares their innovative works of the early 1960s and the artistic context that allowed them to emerge.

My second chapter begins with a comparison of Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus, two writers who embody the competing aesthetic visions of contemporary “realists” and “experimentalists.” Focusing on their work and their high-profile debate about literary difficulty, I argue that their mutual commitment to their “community of readers” (as Franzen puts it) and to narratives of “the family gone wrong” (as Marcus puts it) actually points to a shared social vision, a vision in which “family” values are more important than aesthetic and political antagonisms. This focus on the family also cuts across the oppositions central to contemporary American politics, I show, and it informs the fiction and criticism of writers like Jeffrey Eugenides, Aimee Bender, and George Saunders. This domestic turn is figured, in several of these texts, as a revision of both American individualism and postmodern impersonality. I make the case that this triangulating impulse generates a range of formal innovations, from Eugenides’s re-invention of “the marriage plot” to Marcus’s self-reflexive blending of experimental impersonality and post-postmodern “emotionality.”

Ian McEwan’s post-realism is part of a marked aesthetic shift that began in the last decades of the twentieth century and continues into the twenty-first. His novels, with their attention to close description and dependence on context as well as a qualified sense that language can capture inner and outer worlds, are part of a turn to the kinds of realism characteristic of the long nineteenth century. The essay argues the turn is transformative rather than nostalgic because, like so many of his contemporaries, McEwan responds to contemporary socio-political crises by means of postmodern strategies that include parody, irony, hybridity and metafiction. Three mid-career novels that loosely share the geopolitical context of World War II and the Cold War illustrate the argument: The Innocent, Black Dogs and Atonement. Postmodern technique and novelistic realism together provide a vehicle for McEwan’s long-standing exploration of human violence across both public and private spheres.