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A detailed discussion of each contributor and their readies introducing new details about some of the most obscure contributors and new insights from some of the better known contributors. Taken as a whole, this chapter is a history of modernism and modernist writers, artists, journalists, poets, radicals and others.

With references ranging from Aristotle and Spinoza to Agamben, the Introduction starts with consideration of how individuals’ capacities and faculties have been conceived in terms of potentiality. Drawing on Foucault and others, it discusses how such capacities have increasingly been regulated as labour power and purchasing power. This bears on assertions that postmodernism's predominance of late‐capitalism undermines culturally combative possibilities of individual freedom and literary experimentation. Such an assertion has, however, been contested by various American activists, theorists, and writers since the 1960s. The Introduction outlines how some of those contestations are taken up in the subsequent chapters. It also shows how ‘potentiality’ has frequently been invoked by theorists of postmodernism, postmodern avant‐gardism, and literary ‘possible worlds’, although the theorists have not considered at length how the complex meanings of potentiality bear on both individual capacity and literary possibility.

This final chapter presents some concluding thoughts. This book has examined the prose and poetry of four different writers who have linked experience and experiment. In their writing a move from experience understood as a squaring of inner with outer matters to experience understood as a search for the conditions by which a work becomes shareable can be found. This process is called “experimental writing”. The rest of this final chapter outlines how that process is differently acknowledged in four provisional universals. The works analysed in this book are about discovering ways of going on within a common linguistic inheritance.

Fontana’s renewed engagement with the subject of viper venom resulted in a massive study of more than 600 pages. Book II of the Treatise on the Venom of the Viper produced a new interpretation of the working of viper venom and turned to the exploration of the “hidden causes” of the observable effects of venom poisoning. The new book is again permeated by methods discourse. Fontana’s methodological statements became much more pointed and elaborate, and he drew them together in a methodological essay. Most early modern texts contained quite detailed and often vivid narratives of concrete experiments. Fontana’s commitment to variations turned the attention from single events to series of experiments and from the uniformity of outcomes to differences. This opened up new questions, both questions of experimental design and related questions of conceptualization, interpretation, and, ultimately, reporting: What are the factors need to be varied? What do the differences between different experiments tell us? How much of this work should be reported? And how should the report be organized? The chapter argues that Fontana’s sprawling account was meant to demonstrate the discoverability of empirical findings.

This introductory chapter discusses the beginnings of the friendship between two intellectuals, Gertrude Stein and Bernard Faÿ, which served as the context for reconciling Stein's “progressive” experimental writing and her later “reactionary” politics. Both Stein and Faÿ would find that they had many things in common, yet perhaps the most profound—if not the most troubling—aspect of this friendship was their mutual admiration of Philippe Pétain, whose politics seemed counter to Stein's progressive, avant-garde aesthetics and beliefs. Further complicating the issue wasthe troubled backdrop of the interwar years—wherein the political upheavals following the First World War had given way to jadedness for the current political systems, as well as the formation of new hybrid political movements—with an uneasy Europe struggling to come to terms with the United States' siren's call for “modernization.”

In winter 2017, a Polish homelessness charity published a book of literary texts, written almost entirely by people with experience of homelessness, entitled Niewidzialni (The Invisibles). The intention behind The Invisibles was to construct the experience of homelessness through an intriguing material practice: the book is printed in ink that is only visible in sub-zero temperatures and can only be read outside of the warmth and comfort of our flats and sofas. It consequently forces the reader to share the experience of being out in the cold. This chapter looks at the strategies used in the book to (re)produce the experience of living rough and the way in which its representation becomes subject to elliptical practices. This will include a discussion of the different perspectives on the questions of agency and forms of representation, or representability, of ‘roofless’ existence and the need for expression.

This chapter is based on Harkness’s three London novels to explore how they provided a space in which she was able to experiment with a new style of literary realism designed to reflect both its historical moment and an evolving linguistic and political discourse. It argues that, in a period of social change, Harkness’s task in writing novels about contemporary social conditions required her to employ the shared language and conventions of the present but, crucially, to listen and hear the as yet unarticulated but evolving meanings of the future. It explores the ways in which Harkness’s writing participates in and contributes to emerging forms of experimental writing that seek to relay the experience of urban modernity.

The final chapter moves away from earlier conceptions of abstraction in literature elucidated in the book, such as a literature that is non-representational, iconographic, or satirical of its own existence as art, to mark out the rising ambitions within the British post-war novel towards a new brand of visualization influenced by screen culture. Considering the varied approaches taken by the novelists John Berger, Christine Brooke-Rose, and B. S. Johnson towards the novel as a construct, as novel and as ‘anti-novel’, the discussion scrutinizes the visible layers of truth and artifice in post-war fiction in order to prompt new and more resonant ways of looking in, at, and through literary narrative.

Georges Perec is considered one of the most significant twentieth century writers. While perhaps best known for his first breakthrough novel Things and his monumental Life A Users Manual and perhaps his involvement in the Oulipo group, over the course of his writing career Perec produced, in Alison James’s words, ‘a body of work that is astonishing in its breadth and originality’. Perec’s stated ambition was to ‘write every kind of thing that it is possible for a man to write’, from acrostics and palindromes, to crosswords and revealing parodies of academic journal articles. The sheer diversity of Perec’s own output and the richness and insight of many of his non-fiction essays has provided scholars, writers and artists with a veritable toolbox of ideas for adaptation and wider application. This chapter gives a brief account of Perec’s life and extraordinary literary output. It develops the argument that Perec was, in key respects, ahead of his time and that many of his literary experiments were prescient in the way that they speak to and shed significant light on a range of contemporary issues and debates.

With chapter 6 having described the way norms for mental-state ascriptions operate in a top-down manner in discourse domains, chapter 7 explores how individual narratives can in turn have a bottom-up impact on the ascriptive norms circulating within particular domains. To this end, the chapter discusses how Thalia Field’s 2010 experimental narrative Bird Lovers, Backyard employs a strategic oscillation between two nomenclatures that can be used to profile nonhuman as well as human behaviors: (1) the register of action, which characterizes behavior in terms of motivations, goals, and projects; and (2) the register of events, which characterizes behavior in terms of caused movements that have duration in time and direction in space. In braiding together these two registers, Field’s text suggests not only how discourse practices can be repatterned, but also how such repatterning enables broader paradigm shifts—in this case shifts in ways of understanding cross-species encounters and entanglements.