The Strangest Novels in World Literature

Abstract

This paper would like to present a telling specimen of the Strangest Novels. To name things, Farrell’s A Girl in the Head, published in 1967, exposes its own literary devices. The twentieth century novel shows stylized pages that are made to parallel the elaborations of a mind that revels in its own deviations.
Farrell’s A Girl in the Head is a well-crafted novel. It shows Farrell discovering his style. His comic sense in this novel heralds what he is going to do with it in his more mature historical novels.
The Farrellian novel echoes Tristram Shandy, an eighteenth Century novel. The latter, the most openly self-conscious in its ‘baring’ of novelistic devices, not only exposes the devices of fiction but also defamiliarises time. Sterne’s is an exceedingly funny novel despite the fact that its author has been accused of plagiarism. Victor Shklovsky , a Russian formalist declares in his famous study Russian Formalist Criticism that “Tristrim Shandy is the most typical novel in world Literature.”