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Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature
"If there were a literary avant-garde that were relevant now, it would be what the queers and their allies are doing, at the intersections, across disciplines. This avant-garde would be inclusive, racially and culturally diverse, migrants galore, predominately but not exclusively working-class, transdisciplinary, (gender)queer and politically clued up (left)."
Isabel Waidner
Liberating the Canon is an edited anthology capturing the contemporary emergence of radically innovative and nonconforming forms of literature in the UK and US. Historically, sociopolitical marginalisation and avant-garde aesthetics have not come together in UK literature, counterintuitively divorcing outsider experience and formal innovation. Bringing together intersectional identity and literary innovation, LTC is designed as an intervention against the normativity of literary publishing contexts and the institution 'Innovative Literature' as such. More widely, if literature, any literature, can act as a mode of cultural resistance and help imagine a more progressive politics in Tory Britain and beyond, it is this.
Edited by Isabel Waidner, Liberating the Canon includes contributors working at the intersections of prose, poetry, art, performance, indie publishing and various subcultural contexts:
Mojisola Adebayo, Jess Arndt (US), Jay Bernard, Richard Brammer, Victoria Brown, SJ Fowler, Juliet Jacques, Sara Jaffe (US), Roz Kaveney, R. Zamora Linmark (US), Mira Mattar, Seabright D.Mortimer, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Rosie Snajdr, Timothy Thornton, Isabel Waidner, Joanna Walsh and Eley Williams.
Isabel Waidner
Liberating the Canon is an edited anthology capturing the contemporary emergence of radically innovative and nonconforming forms of literature in the UK and US. Historically, sociopolitical marginalisation and avant-garde aesthetics have not come together in UK literature, counterintuitively divorcing outsider experience and formal innovation. Bringing together intersectional identity and literary innovation, LTC is designed as an intervention against the normativity of literary publishing contexts and the institution 'Innovative Literature' as such. More widely, if literature, any literature, can act as a mode of cultural resistance and help imagine a more progressive politics in Tory Britain and beyond, it is this.
Edited by Isabel Waidner, Liberating the Canon includes contributors working at the intersections of prose, poetry, art, performance, indie publishing and various subcultural contexts:
Mojisola Adebayo, Jess Arndt (US), Jay Bernard, Richard Brammer, Victoria Brown, SJ Fowler, Juliet Jacques, Sara Jaffe (US), Roz Kaveney, R. Zamora Linmark (US), Mira Mattar, Seabright D.Mortimer, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Rosie Snajdr, Timothy Thornton, Isabel Waidner, Joanna Walsh and Eley Williams.
271 pages, Paperback
First published January 4, 2018
7 people are currently reading
268 people want to read
About the author
Isabel Waidner
13 books130 followersIsabel Waidner is a writer and critical theorist.
Their books include We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff (2019), Gaudy Bauble (2017) and Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (ed., 2018), published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe.
Waidner's critical and creative texts have appeared in journals including AQNB, Cambridge Literary Review, The Happy Hypocrite, Tank Magazine and Tripwire.
They are the co-founder of the event series Queers Read This at the Institute of Contemporary Art (with Richard Porter), and an academic at University of Roehampton, London.
Their books include We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff (2019), Gaudy Bauble (2017) and Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (ed., 2018), published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe.
Waidner's critical and creative texts have appeared in journals including AQNB, Cambridge Literary Review, The Happy Hypocrite, Tank Magazine and Tripwire.
They are the co-founder of the event series Queers Read This at the Institute of Contemporary Art (with Richard Porter), and an academic at University of Roehampton, London.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
March 22, 2025
The child was supposed to add commas and full-stops and semicolons and God-knows- what-else in the correct places so that the writing’s meaning might be carved into easier-to-swallow pieces.
Eley Williams, The Flood and the Keeper.
The Guardian recently featured an important article in response to two newer book prizes, the Jhalak Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize. The headline "Awards for women, writers of colour, small presses – why are there so many books prizes?" might have appeared perjorative, but the article itself highlighted why those two prizes in particular were so important and is worth quoting in detail.
But if literary publishing is bad, innovative (or experimental, or avant grade) publishing is worse. Literary innovation has been the prerogative of the white middle-class patriarchy.
Their response is this anthology:
Bringing together intersectionality and literary innovation, Liberating the Canon is designed as an intervention against the normativity of literary publishing contexts and the institution ‘Innovative Literature’ as such. This is how we redo canonical: We don’t just work across the identity categories (BAME, LGBTQI, women, working class) and their various intersections. (We don’t just put our difference to work.). We also work across formal distinction (prose and poetry, and various genre distinctions) and across disciplines (literature, art, performance, critical theory and various subcultural contexts), unrepressing what the cultural theorist Raymond Williams termed the ‘multiplicity of writing’.
The resulting book contains a wonderful variety of pieces as per her description from a range of authors including Waidner themself, the also Republic of Consciousness Prize (for Attrib. and other stories) shortlisted Eley Williams, Joanna Walsh (author of Vertigo - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), and the two co-founders of publishing house Doestevsky Wannabe (Richard Brammer and Victoria Brown).
I'm not sure I can do the collection justice but Waidner's introduction provides a good overview. If there was one common theme I took away it was how language itself can enshrine convention, perhaps best expressed by Seabright D Mortimer in their contribution:
If language is an environment, that must mean words have a physicality and belong to an ecology. Speech is a psycho-physical act that is ‘produced by the body.’ It is a physical process, one instrinsic to our sense of self, our relationship with gender, and it dictates how our bodies move around in the world. Verbal language, the product of bodied speech, does not have to shore up existing de facto systems and ecologists. It can be used to resist and underwrite* them. Language is a weird material crying to be punched I say.
(* albeit I suspect they meant underwrite as a neologism, equivalent to undermining with writing, and not what it means to me as someone who works in insurance)
Doestevsky Wannabe's own role in publishing this anthology, and canon-reinventing literature generally, is also key - as Waidner explains:
Using contemporary print on demand techniques, Doestevsky Wannabe have developed a publishing practice that allows them to print and widely distribute their books on zero overheads and little financial capital.
[...]
There is no budget. Dostoyevsky Wannabe work with a nonprofit publishing ethos, that is, they sell their books via Amazon at cost price in order to make them affordable to as broad a readership as possible. Publishers, designer, editor and authors are working for free, and mostly without institutional support. The aim is to produce books that challenge literary conventions, and to precipitate the ongoing disruption of the British publishing establishment.
Waidner also acknowledges the important role of other small independent presses (the focus of the Republic of Consciousness Prize) including And Other Stories, Book Works, Dead Ink, Dodo Ink, Galley Beggar, Influx Press and Tilted Axis, in drastically changing what and whose work is being published, and as a result, what work is being written, by who.
A vitally important book - buy it!
Eley Williams, The Flood and the Keeper.
The Guardian recently featured an important article in response to two newer book prizes, the Jhalak Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize. The headline "Awards for women, writers of colour, small presses – why are there so many books prizes?" might have appeared perjorative, but the article itself highlighted why those two prizes in particular were so important and is worth quoting in detail.
The value of [book prizes] has long been hotly debated, with some writers going so far as to maintain that having so many prizes deforms the literary culture. The Man Booker prize, in particular, has been charged with dictating the sort of novel that is thought to be worth publishing and promoting, thereby influencing the books authors have felt compelled to write over the last 50 years.As a Judge of the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the most striking of the many wonderful books we received, and one that deservedly made our shortlist, was Isabel Waidner's Gaudy Bauble - (my review) and Waidner has also now published this anthology of innovative literature, Liberating the Canon. From her introduction (republished in full in 3:AM Magazine - slogan 'Whatever it is, we're against it) it is clear that they share the Guardian's analysis of the problems with innovative literature:
But shortlists this week from two of the newest awards – both in their second years – tell a more nuanced story. Both were set up in reaction to the status quo by writers with a mission. The Jhalak prize seeks the book of the year from “a writer of colour”, while the Republic of Consciousness prize has set its sights on rewarding the smallest of small publishers, those with no more than five full-time employees.
The shortlists these niche prizes have produced are instructively different.
[...]
The history of corrective prizes – the Goldsmiths for experimental fiction or the Folio, for instance, both of which were set up to counter existing awards – is that they tend to cluster around the same writers, if not the same books.
[...]
This year’s shortlist for the Republic of Consciousness prize for small presses suggests that eligibility by scale at the point of production may actually turn out more radical results.
But if literary publishing is bad, innovative (or experimental, or avant grade) publishing is worse. Literary innovation has been the prerogative of the white middle-class patriarchy.
Their response is this anthology:
Bringing together intersectionality and literary innovation, Liberating the Canon is designed as an intervention against the normativity of literary publishing contexts and the institution ‘Innovative Literature’ as such. This is how we redo canonical: We don’t just work across the identity categories (BAME, LGBTQI, women, working class) and their various intersections. (We don’t just put our difference to work.). We also work across formal distinction (prose and poetry, and various genre distinctions) and across disciplines (literature, art, performance, critical theory and various subcultural contexts), unrepressing what the cultural theorist Raymond Williams termed the ‘multiplicity of writing’.
The resulting book contains a wonderful variety of pieces as per her description from a range of authors including Waidner themself, the also Republic of Consciousness Prize (for Attrib. and other stories) shortlisted Eley Williams, Joanna Walsh (author of Vertigo - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), and the two co-founders of publishing house Doestevsky Wannabe (Richard Brammer and Victoria Brown).
I'm not sure I can do the collection justice but Waidner's introduction provides a good overview. If there was one common theme I took away it was how language itself can enshrine convention, perhaps best expressed by Seabright D Mortimer in their contribution:
If language is an environment, that must mean words have a physicality and belong to an ecology. Speech is a psycho-physical act that is ‘produced by the body.’ It is a physical process, one instrinsic to our sense of self, our relationship with gender, and it dictates how our bodies move around in the world. Verbal language, the product of bodied speech, does not have to shore up existing de facto systems and ecologists. It can be used to resist and underwrite* them. Language is a weird material crying to be punched I say.
(* albeit I suspect they meant underwrite as a neologism, equivalent to undermining with writing, and not what it means to me as someone who works in insurance)
Doestevsky Wannabe's own role in publishing this anthology, and canon-reinventing literature generally, is also key - as Waidner explains:
Using contemporary print on demand techniques, Doestevsky Wannabe have developed a publishing practice that allows them to print and widely distribute their books on zero overheads and little financial capital.
[...]
There is no budget. Dostoyevsky Wannabe work with a nonprofit publishing ethos, that is, they sell their books via Amazon at cost price in order to make them affordable to as broad a readership as possible. Publishers, designer, editor and authors are working for free, and mostly without institutional support. The aim is to produce books that challenge literary conventions, and to precipitate the ongoing disruption of the British publishing establishment.
Waidner also acknowledges the important role of other small independent presses (the focus of the Republic of Consciousness Prize) including And Other Stories, Book Works, Dead Ink, Dodo Ink, Galley Beggar, Influx Press and Tilted Axis, in drastically changing what and whose work is being published, and as a result, what work is being written, by who.
A vitally important book - buy it!
September 18, 2018
"Liberating the Canon (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018) is an edited anthology capturing the contemporary emergence of nonconforming and radically innovative literatures in the UK and beyond."
These are the opening words of Isabel Waidner's introduction to her collection which pulls together contributions from multiple sources, including Waidner herself. What follows is wide variety of pieces. Some of them are straightforward narratives, some of them I struggle to make sense of even after a couple of readings (which, by the way, doesn’t mean I didn’t like them, just that I was, probably intentionally, brought up short by them and had to stop and wonder). One of them is set in the bar from TV sitcom Cheers (and that one ends with the appropriate "It’s great here, I wrote. Everybody knows my name.").
Some of the contributors' names are familiar to me. Last year, I read and loved Attrib. by Eley Williams and Worlds from the Word’s End by Joanna Walsh, and both those authors appear here. So do Richard Brammer and Victoria Brown who are the co-founders of this book’s publisher (Dostoyevsky Wannabe). Other names are completely new to me. On the back of the book, it says it "…includes contributors working at the intersections of prose, poetry, art, performance, indie publishing and various subcultural contexts…".
There is little point in attempting to summarise the contents of a collection such as this. You have to read it to experience the variety. And my personal view is that you should read it. It is an important book that ought to, I think, encourage its readers to explore further writings from this avant-garde of literature.
These are the opening words of Isabel Waidner's introduction to her collection which pulls together contributions from multiple sources, including Waidner herself. What follows is wide variety of pieces. Some of them are straightforward narratives, some of them I struggle to make sense of even after a couple of readings (which, by the way, doesn’t mean I didn’t like them, just that I was, probably intentionally, brought up short by them and had to stop and wonder). One of them is set in the bar from TV sitcom Cheers (and that one ends with the appropriate "It’s great here, I wrote. Everybody knows my name.").
Some of the contributors' names are familiar to me. Last year, I read and loved Attrib. by Eley Williams and Worlds from the Word’s End by Joanna Walsh, and both those authors appear here. So do Richard Brammer and Victoria Brown who are the co-founders of this book’s publisher (Dostoyevsky Wannabe). Other names are completely new to me. On the back of the book, it says it "…includes contributors working at the intersections of prose, poetry, art, performance, indie publishing and various subcultural contexts…".
There is little point in attempting to summarise the contents of a collection such as this. You have to read it to experience the variety. And my personal view is that you should read it. It is an important book that ought to, I think, encourage its readers to explore further writings from this avant-garde of literature.
February 21, 2018
Review to follow
March 23, 2018
A strong selection of innovative/experimental literature. Non-mainstream approaches to story telling with a strong representation of queer/genderqueer writers and working-class writers—efforts like this anthology showcase the importance of small, indie publishers like Manchester's Dostoyevsky Wannabe. A longer review will follow on my blog and I am planning to conduct an interview with the co-founders of DW (both of whom have contributions here) for 3:AM Magazine in the next month.
Update: An entirely idiosyncratic response to this collection can now be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2018/03/22/so...
Update: An entirely idiosyncratic response to this collection can now be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2018/03/22/so...
May 8, 2018
My review is here:
http://www.drb.ie/essays/not-so-simple
http://www.drb.ie/essays/not-so-simple
March 17, 2018
A fully avant-garde collection of voices often unheard in literature, let alone experimental fiction. Being an anthology is both its weakness and its strength, as whatever you like or dislike in a given story -- well it's over quickly. I am not an afficianado of experimental fiction but I enjoyed a great deal of the collection. It showed me both a range of possibilities in form, as well as in subject, centering a panoply of queer experiences and stories, something that's hard to find.
I recommend it, it will shake you up like a cool breeze and remind you of what is possible and missing from so much of what is presented as Literature today.
I recommend it, it will shake you up like a cool breeze and remind you of what is possible and missing from so much of what is presented as Literature today.
October 4, 2018
A varied collection exploring "non-conventional" lives, sometimes with formally unconventional styles. Some are less interesting than others. Use your skill and judgement to decide which ones I mean.
December 20, 2018
Reading this on the train and going Oh I’m one of this lot aren’t I. Also realising my mate was in there and I didn’t know until after I’d bought it
January 20, 2025
“I don’t know. I don’t know what that means. Of 32 classic volumes I have yet to read one.” I crossed the finish line of my three-day Isabel Waidner marathon today with Liberating The Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature, which Waidner edited and provided a trio of (unsurprisingly daring and excellent) pieces: Fantômas Takes Sutton, Avant-Ice, and New Romantic & Tender Hearts. They also wrote up an illuminating introduction highlighting and contextualising the disparity in representation amongst avant-garde and innovative literary writing. The collection is fit to burst with some of the most exciting writers and their original craft. Some highlights include ‘The Flood and the Keeper’, where a child’s strange dream of a zookeeper is brought dancingly to life by Eley Williams; Mojisola Adebayo’s ‘Stars’, an unusual, harrowing play about female genital mutilation; the eery ‘The Bassment Gallery’ by Steven J. Fowler, full of “overwhelming animal fear”; Jay Bernard’s pair of wavy pieces; a pair of captivating yet disparate stories from Jess Arndt; the poetic staccato in Nisha Ramaya’s ‘Fainting Away’; ‘Supermarket Revelations’, an intricate prose introspection by Seabright D. Mortimer; Nat Raha’s poetry, visually stunning and formally daring. Lastly, Joanna Walsh is as good as ever in ‘I Wish Someone Loved Me That Isn’t Capitalism’ — “I’d love to write more of this story but my fingers hurt.” A diverse range of writers all pushing the boundaries.
February 5, 2020
I think I found this book more inspiring than any collection I've read in the past few years. It seemed to stand alone for so many reasons which is perplexing to me because it seems so uniquely universal in its scope.
Why read this?
If you're a student of literature, it should be part of your curriculum. But it isn't a book merely to be studied; for so many reasons it should be absorbed like a vitamin supplement to ward off literary scurvy. It's fresh, challenging and remarkable.
If you're just someone who is a little book tired and looking for something new and invigorating... Open this book. You will find so many things to think about. You'll be left with the overwhelming feeling that the current literary world is 30 years behind the real world... you'll wonder... why is that? why has no one noticed?
I hadn't noticed.
Particular highlight was Jay Bernard's pieces.
Why read this?
If you're a student of literature, it should be part of your curriculum. But it isn't a book merely to be studied; for so many reasons it should be absorbed like a vitamin supplement to ward off literary scurvy. It's fresh, challenging and remarkable.
If you're just someone who is a little book tired and looking for something new and invigorating... Open this book. You will find so many things to think about. You'll be left with the overwhelming feeling that the current literary world is 30 years behind the real world... you'll wonder... why is that? why has no one noticed?
I hadn't noticed.
Particular highlight was Jay Bernard's pieces.
April 29, 2018
There is a lot of exciting new work here. I would like to see more work by people outside the university systems. A refreshing read. Well worth exploring!!
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews