Introduction: Invisible Lives, Silent Voices in the British Literature, Arts and Culture of the 20th and 21st Centuries

Abstract

This volume offers a selection of the papers of the international conference “Invisibles Lives, Silent Voices in the British Culture, Literature and Arts of the 20th and 21stCenturies”, which was organised online on the 15th and 16th October 2020 by Alice Borrego (université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, EMMA) and Héloïse Lecomte (ENS de Lyon, IRHIM). The present articles offer new interpretations of the complex representations of invisibility and silence in artistic and literary works of the 20th and 21st centuries. From modernism to the contemporary period, the diverse forms of expressions (short stories, novels, autobiographical narratives and musical documentaries) analysed in these papers question the possibility of giving (back) a voice to the invisibilised populations of British society.

Keywords

• invisibility
• silence
• voice
• spectrality
• precariousness
• vulnerability