Il giorno dopo il modernismo

Persistenze del one-day novel nel romanzo inglese del secondo Novecento

Abstract

This essay examines the persistence of Modernism in post-war British fiction through a specific formal device: the one-day novel. Treating Modernism not as a concluded period but as a repertoire of reactivatable procedures, the analysis addresses temporality as a structural problem of the twentieth-century novel. The one-day novel emerges as a paradoxical form of densification: by compressing the action into twenty-four hours, it renders visible the interferences between the everyday, memory, and historical pressure. After reconstructing the state of the art and situating the form within debates on narrative temporality, the essay proceeds through two analytical stages. On one hand, a late-modernist nucleus in which the single day becomes a laboratory of stasis, congestion, and historical-social pressure, exemplified by Henry Green's Party Going and Philip Larkin's A Girl in Winter. On the other, a post-1945 reactivation in which the same frame returns to function as a machine of consciousness and montage: the case of Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man. A brief survey of contemporary fiction suggests, finally, that the one-day novel is not an archaeological residue but a still active and generative form.