Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
1. A Fine Thing: A History of Chance
2. ‘Swear to tell me everything that goes wrong': Henry Green and
Free Will in the Novel
3. ‘I admire the will to welcome everything - the stupid violence
of chance': Samuel Beckett and the Representation of
Possibility
4. ‘Let's Celebrate the Accidental': B.S. Johnson, the Aleatory and
the Radical Generation.
5. ‘The incomprehensible operation of grace': Mess, Contingency,
and the Example of Iris Murdoch.
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Examines the ways mid-twentieth century writers represent chance, arguing that their depictions of, and anxieties about, chance mark a new relationship between author and narrative.
Julia Jordan is a teaching fellow at University College London, UK.
"Julia Jordan has a keen eye for the paradoxes implicit in
fiction's attempts to represent the workings of contingency, and in
this lucid, eloquent study of chance in post-war British fiction
she combines illuminating close readings of the work of such as
Samuel Beckett, Henry Green, and B.S. Johnson, with
thought-provoking analyses of changing attitudes to the random. The
experimental nature of much of the best of post-war British fiction
is too often air-brushed out of critical accounts of the period:
this study forcefully demonstrates the way chance acted as a
catalyst for the narrative innovations of a number of the era's
most daring and influential writers."
*Professor Mark Ford, Department of English, University College
London, UK*
"Jordan's book offers a fresh and original polemic as well as a
scholarly introduction to the role of chance in narrative. The
topic has never been handled previously with as much awareness of
the full range of philosophical issues it broaches, or with as much
sensitivity to the full range of literary responses it is capable
of eliciting."
*Rod Mengham, Reader in Modern English Literature, University of
Cambridge, UK*
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