The Avant-Postman: Experiment in Anglophone and Francophone Fiction in the Wake of James Joyce

The Avant-Postman explores a broad range of innovative postwar writing in France, Britain, and the United States. Taking James Joyce's "revolution of the word" in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as a joint starting point, David Vichnar draws genealogical lines through the work of more than fifty writers up to the present, including Alain Robbe-Grillet, B. S. Johnson, William Burroughs, Christine Brooke-Rose, Georges Perec, Kathy Acker, Iain Sinclair, Hlne Cixous, Alan Moore, David Foster Wallace, and many others. Centering the exploration around five writing strategies employed by Joyce-narrative parallax, stylistic metempsychosis, concrete writing, forgery, and neologising the logos-the book reveals the striking continuities and developments from Joyce's day to our own.