Introduction: Reassessing Literary Commitment (Anew)

• Main Author: Catherine Bernard
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2016-04-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: fiction; English novel; modernism; commitment; autonomy; ethics
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/3074

In the wake of recent issues of Études britanniques contemporaines devoted to the historical purport of 20th–and 21st–century British literature, the articles gathered here explore the way many British writers have, since Modernism, reassessed and reworked the dialectics holding commitment and autonomy in a fruitful tension. Ranging from Radclyffe Hall to Martin Amis, these papers once more question the political and artistic relevance of such a dialectics. They thus aim at shedding light on the complex imperative of literary integrity, whether it be formal or ethical. Literature is consequently defined as a space of interpellation, at the junction of words and reality, where language becomes accountable to our often conflicted sense of the human.