New Puritans
Encyclopedia
The New Puritans was a literary movement ascribed to the contributors to a 2000 anthology of short stories
Short story
A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...

 entitled All Hail the New Puritans, edited by Nicholas Blincoe
Nicholas Blincoe
Nicholas Blincoe is an English author, critic and screenwriter. He is the author of six novels, Acid Casuals , Jello Salad , Manchester Slingback , The Dope Priest , White Mice , Burning Paris...

 and Matt Thorne
Matt Thorne
Matt Thorne is an English writer born in 1974 who has published seven novels. Thorne grew up in Bristol, England, and was educated at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University. Thorne's first book, Tourist, was published in 1998. The book is an attack on the negative effects of tourism on...

. The project is said to have been inspired by the Dogme 95
Dogme 95
Dogme 95 was an avant-garde filmmaking movement started in 1995 by the Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, who created the "Dogme 95 Manifesto" and the "Vow of Chastity". These were rules to create filmmaking based on the traditional values of story, acting, and theme, and...

 manifesto for cinematic
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

 minimalism and authenticity . The young writers in the anthology deliberately eschewed many of the devices favoured by the pre-eminent British literary generation exemplified by Martin Amis
Martin Amis
Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money and London Fields . He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year...

 and Salman Rushdie.

Manifesto

The 10-point manifesto reads:
  1. Primarily storytellers, we are dedicated to the narrative form.
  2. We are prose writers and recognise that prose is the dominant form of expression. For this reason we shun poetry and poetic licence in all its forms.
  3. While acknowledging the value of genre fiction, whether classical or modern, we will always move towards new openings, rupturing existing genre expectations.
  4. We believe in textual simplicity and vow to avoid all devices of voice: rhetoric, authorial asides.
  5. In the name of clarity, we recognise the importance of temporal linearity and eschew flashbacks, dual temporal narratives and foreshadowing.
  6. We believe in grammatical purity and avoid any elaborate punctuation.
  7. We recognise that published works are also historical documents. As fragments of our time, all our texts are dated and set in the present day. All products, places, artists and objects named are real.
  8. As faithful representation of the present, our texts will avoid all improbable or unknowable speculations on the past or the future.
  9. We are moralists, so all texts feature a recognisable ethical reality.
  10. We take advantage of and live on the backs of famous bands who peaked in the early 1980's.


The 15 contributors to the anthology included Geoff Dyer
Geoff Dyer
Geoff Dyer is a British author and novelist. He is also a journalist who writes about a wide range of topics. His published work includes four novels and several books of non-fiction, which have won a number of literary awards...

, Alex Garland
Alex Garland
Alexander Medawar "Alex" Garland is a British novelist and screenwriter.-Early life:Garland was born in London, England, the son of psychoanalyst Caroline and political cartoonist Nicholas Garland. His maternal grandparents were zoologist Peter Medawar and author Jean Medawar...

, Daren King
Daren King
Laurence Daren King is an award-winning contemporary English novelist. His debut novel, Boxy an Star, was shortlisted for the 1999 Guardian First Book Award and longlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. He won first prize in the Nestle Children's Book Prize in 2006...

, Toby Litt
Toby Litt
Toby Litt is an English writer, born in Bedford in 1968. He studied at Bedford Modern School, read English at Worcester College, Oxford and studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia where he was taught by Malcolm Bradbury....

, Tony White
Tony White
Anthony Wilbur White is a former West Indian cricketer who played in two Tests in 1965....

, Rebecca Ray, Simon Lewis
Simon Lewis
Simon Lewis is a novelist and screenwriter, born in Newport, Monmouthshire, in 1971. He went to school in Monmouth then studied Art and Art History at Goldsmiths College in London....

, Ben Richards
Ben Richards
Ben Richards is an English actor. He is best known for playing Bruno Milligan in series 4 and 5 of the British TV drama Footballers' Wives and in series 1 and 2 of its spin-off Footballers' Wives: Extra Time...

 and Scarlett Thomas
Scarlett Thomas
Scarlett Thomas, born 1972 in Hammersmith, is an English author. She has written eight novels, including The End of Mr. Y and PopCo, and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Kent.-Biography:...

. Reviews for the book were mixed, with some critics confused as to the intentions of the project.

New Puritanism has not been espoused by any well-known writers since the book's publication, and the contributors have not collaborated since, although several of them contributed to the literary magazine Zembla
Zembla (magazine)
Zembla was a literary and arts magazine published in London for eight issues between 2003 and 2005. The editor was Dan Crowe, publisher Simon Finch and the designer was Vince Frost...

 (2003-2005).

See also

  • Dogme 95
    Dogme 95
    Dogme 95 was an avant-garde filmmaking movement started in 1995 by the Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, who created the "Dogme 95 Manifesto" and the "Vow of Chastity". These were rules to create filmmaking based on the traditional values of story, acting, and theme, and...

  • Stuckism
    Stuckism
    Stuckism is an international art movement founded in 1999 by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting in opposition to conceptual art...

  • New Sincerity
    New Sincerity
    New sincerity is a term that has been used in music, aesthetics, film criticism, poetry, literary criticism and philosophy, generally to describe art or concepts that run against prevailing modes of postmodernist irony or cynicism.-New sincerity in music:...

  • Post-postmodernism
    Post-Postmodernism
    Post-postmodernism is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture which are emerging from and reacting to postmodernism.-Periodization:...

  • Remodernism
    Remodernism
    Remodernism revives aspects of modernism, particularly in its early form, and follows postmodernism, to which it contrasts. Adherents of remodernism advocate it as a forward and radical, not reactionary, impetus....


External links

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