In the fraught environment of the post-World War II literary field, the novel had a central importance. Positioned as the paradigmatic form of a pre-war British liberal-humanism – with all its attendant values of human rationality, dignity and autonomy – the novel entered a perceived period of crisis following the advent of the Second World War, registered by the many midcentury polemics proclaiming the ‘death of the novel’. In one sense related to the damage dealt to the old humanist confidences at the heart of political liberalism by the atrocities of fascism, large-scale death and the bedding-in of totalitarian political systems, the supposed death of the novel also related to the ongoing litigation of the legacy of modernism (particularly the apparent novelistic limit-point of Joyce’s work). This prompted a culture war of sorts between a revanchist English realism (embodied by literary ‘schools’ like the Angry Young Men, C. P. Snow circle and the Movement) and a diverse collection of writers indebted to the literary experiments of the early twentieth-century, who in some cases retained affiliations with a still-flourishing continental avant-garde. My PhD focuses on a loose collection of novelists who exploited the newly unstable idea of the novel which developed out of post-war literary debates to experiment with and in some cases radically alter its form. These authors include Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Muriel Spark, Samuel Beckett and James Hanley, whose literary interventions reflect one or another aspect of this turbulent intellectual context. In particular, my research documents their experiments with a sonic aesthetic – often derived from these authors contact with sound media and technology – subversively introduced to the ‘silent’ literary form of the novel. In these works the sonic stands for many things which the (English, realist, protestant) novel had traditionally not – from the irrational, the disorienting or just the plain boring, to the the non-linguistic, the non-human and the non-referential. Taken together, this idiosyncratic corpus recalls one of several lost futures for the novel from a time when questions of its purpose, scope and constitution remained radically open.