Introduction

Abstract

This issue of Études britanniques contemporaines aims at questioning the relevance of indexing literariness on a revolutionary aesthetics inherited from the great 20th century avant-gardes. The articles here gathered explore other modalities and other forms of the revolutionary. Covering a wide historical spectrum, from modernism to contemporary fiction, the readings here offered remind us that the revolutionary may adopt many different forms; while, for the modernist writers analyzed here, formal disjuncture structures writing by unhinging language, revolution may, for other writers, be a historical or political object, and thus become the very objet of writing, the very matter of experience.

Keywords

• literary revolution
• experimentation
• emancipation
• political revolution
• historical consciousness
• writing of history