The English novel was essentially bourgeois in its origin and throughout the 18th and

the 19th centuries it was firmly anchored in a social world with the gain or loss of
social status as its favourite theme. The novelist used to make digressions, address
the reader, comment on his own performance, and he was faced with a relatively easy
task: he was expected to mediate between his characters and the reader, relating in a
more or less objective way significant events and incidents in chronological order. The
existence of accepted values and standards of behaviour led to the presentation of a
social pattern which was familiar territory to both reader and writer. The novel
remained basically unaltered till the second decade of the 20th century when there
was the shift from the Victorian to the modern novel.
This change was characterised by a gradual but substantial transformation of British
society, which in a few years passed from the comfortable, prosperous world of the
Victorians and Edwardians to the inter-war years marked by unrest and ferment. This
was an important period because the urgency for social change and, from a literary
point of view, the pressing need for different forms of expression forced novelists into
a position of moral and psychological uncertainty. Their role consisted in mediating
between the solid and unquestioned values of the past and the confused present. This
new 'realism, influenced by French and Russian writers (Marcel Proust, the author of A
la Recherche du Temps Perdu; Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy) tended to shift from
society to man, regarded as a limited creature whose moral progress was dramatically
inferior to his advance in technology.
Two other factors contributed to producing the modern novel: the new concept of time
(a subjective perception of time) and the new theory of the unconscious deriving from
the Freudian influence.
The novelist rejected omniscient narration and experimented new methods to portray
the individual consciousness; the viewpoint shifted from the external world to the
internal world of a character's mind. The analysis of a character's consciousness was
influenced by the theories about the simultaneous existence of different levels of
consciousness and sub-consciousness, where past experience is retained and the
existence of the past in the present determines the whole personality of each human
being. In other words, if the distinction between past and present was almost
meaningless in psychological terms, then there was no use in building a well
structured plot, in leading a character through a well arranged chronological sequence
of events. It was not necessarily the passing of time that revealed the truth about
characters. It might unfold in the course of a single day, as in James Joyce's Ulysses
and in Virginia 'Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, by observing the character performing a
common action, or by what Joyce called 'epiphany, that is the sudden revelation of an
interior reality caused by the most trivial events of everyday life.
The stream of consciousness technique or the interior monologue was introduced to
reproduce the uninterrupted flow of thoughts, sensations, memories, associations and
emotions in a flux of words, ideas and images quite similar to the mind's activity.