Il giorno dopo il modernismo. Persistenze del one-day novel nel romanzo inglese del secondo Novecento

This essay examines the persistence of Modernism in- wpoasrt British fiction through a specific formal device: the o-ndeay novel. Treating Modernism not as a concluded period but as a repertoire of reactivatable procedures, the analysis addresses temtyp oasra ali 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 histori cparlessure. 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 la-tme odernist nucleus in which the single day becomes a laboratorsyis o, fc ostnagestion, and historica-lsocial pressure, exemplified by Henry GreenP'asr ty Going and Philip Larkin'sA Girl in Winter. On the other, a pos-t1945 reactivation in which the same frame returns to function as a machine of consciousness and montage: the case of Christopher IsherwoAo Sdin'sg le Man. A brief survey of contemporary fiction suggests, finally, that the o-ndeay novel is not an archaeological residue but a still active and generative f.o rm