| Summary: | The recently-established Goldsmiths Prize, rewards ‘creative daring [and] fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form’. The prize’s existence suggests a resurgence in the interest in questions of formal novelty, the prestige of which has historically fluctuated in the U.K. Several recently shortlisted novels have broached the topic of contemporary communications technologies and their relationship to narrative and self-definition, while deploying stylistic devices which encourage readers to associate formal experimentation with these themes. In a societal context in which human individuality is seemingly being undermined by technology, it seems pertinent to investigate the ways in which the ‘experimental’ novel can represent character and thought while possibly providing answers to the question of their potentially frightening uniformization.
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