This dissertation seeks to identify, contextualize, and explain the achievement of late modernist novelists. Late modernism represents a significant, under-examined chapter in the development of the twentieth-century novel. Unlike the majority of their peers in the decades after modernism’s height, novelists such as Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Elizabeth Bowen—and the best-known, Samuel Beckett—continue to innovate in prose rather than returning to realism. Unlike their predecessors, late modernists move towards doubt, eschewing the sometimes ultimately redemptive ethos of high modernism. They do so without the insistence of later postmodernists, however, or their playful mood. The result is something new, strange, and “in between.” The aims of this study are to specify the nature of late modernist style, place it in its aesthetic and historical context, and explain its significance. Each chapter is a close reading of key works by one writer: each novelist uses different techniques to add to the late modernist aesthetic, but they all move in the same direction. The first chapter explores Henry Green’s work, analyzing the textual omissions and narrative construction that make his novels so evasive. In Compton-Burnett’s case, the focus is on how dialogue creates a constantly shifting moral world in which nothing can be taken for granted. The chapter on Beckett explores repetition, both as a microscopic stylistic tool and an organizing device that prevents the text from reaching conclusion. In examining Bowen, the centre is how her syntax circles continually around various kinds of “nothingness” and self-reflexively suggests ways to explore it. This study arranges late modernist novelists in a new continuum alongside Samuel Beckett, with the result that Beckett seems less a unique genius, and the other late modernist writers seem less eccentric and more profoundly challenging. They all seek ways to go on writing when doing so seems impossible. Late modernists bring something new to the novel. Through the smallest stylistic gestures, their works make and unmake themselves, refusing to allow the reader finality. They avoid the aesthetic and philosophical associations of either consolation or utter uncertainty; late modernists matter by refusing to matter in a familiar way.

Techn. University, Diss., 2002--Braunschweig.

Thesis (M.A.)--James Madison University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Revision of thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Sussex. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [263]-273) and index.