Modernism and The Novel in English

Contents
Introduction 5
Chapter 1 – Modernism 7
1.1. Background 7
1.2. Early Modernism (James, Forster, Conrad) 10
1.3. Experimentalism (Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence) 11
Chapter 2 – Representative Names and Titles 13
2.1. Henry James 13

2.2. Edward Morgan Forster 16
2.3. Joseph Conrad 19
2.4. Virginia Woolf 22
2.5. James Joyce 25
2.6. David Herbert Lawrence 28
Chapter 3 – Tests 32
3.1. Test One 32

3.2. Test Two 34
3.3. Test Three 35
3.4. Test Four 37
3.5. Test Five 39
3.6. Test Six 41
References 43
Glossary of Literary Terms 44
MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH 3

INTRODUCTION
Introduction
The course is designed so as to allow form to support content and invite at

interactive approaches to the texts and contexts under focus.
Its main objectives are:

 to help students identify the main background issues pertaining to the
modern age and the modernist movement
 to develop students‟ capacity to analyse the literary phenomenon within
the broader multicultural frame of the early decades of the twentieth century
 to bring to attention individual writers and writings, standing for different
trends, narrative practices and techniques
 to encourage the simultaneous understanding and practice of literary and
critical discourse events
 to facilitate the accessing of illustrative texts via literary theory
The volume offers support for the didactic activities addressing third
year philology students, during the first semester of the academic year:
lectures, euristic conversations, explanations, debates, case studies,
problematisation, workshop practice etc.
It comprises an informative section (Chapters1-2: “Modernism” and

“Representative Names and Titles”), an applicative text-oriented part (“Tests”)
and a selective tool kit for decoding varied discourse patternings
(“References” and “Glossary of Literary Terms”) – all of which eventually
envisage mature self improvement through distance learning.

Chapter 1 - MODERNISM
Chapter 1 – Modernism
1.1. Background
Modernism is the early twentieth century orientation associated with

the idea of the avant-garde, of innovation and experimentation, but also with
that of anti-realism, individualism and intellectualism.
Within the modernist frame, a number of movements have been
identified (see Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane [eds], Modernism,
1976):
 decadence (distilling broad generational moods)
 imagism (relating to precise aesthetic programmes or theories)
 expressionism (naming already extant activities)
 symbolism (flourishing in a variety of places and passing from nation to
nation)
 vorticism (at work within small communities)
 futurism (defining a particular generation)
Considering their interrelatedness, one may observe a frenzy of forms
and artistic energies variously expressed and variously justified, may see
strange channels of influence and shifts of meaning, may recognize different
conventions and symbols operative worldwide.
More technical concepts, taken up from the visual arts – where they
are grouped under the umbrella terms of Art Deco or Art Nouveau – and
associated with modernist trends are:
 impressionism
 surrealism
 fauvism
 cubism
They all build up a shift away from the romantic nuances of symbolism
towards a harder, mechanised, more impersonal or classical form of image;
from an assertive aestheticism towards a more crisis-ridden view of the
modern artistic situation; from an ambition of artistic wholeness to a
fascination with decreation. (op. cit: 201)
Meaning to discover significant artistic structures in the increasingly
chaotic situation at the beginning of the twentieth century, to express concern
with the pressure of industrial environment and accelerating change, to
discard „the word‟ in favour of „the thought‟, all these movements formulate
radical politics, of significance for the ensuing generations.
In literature, as in the other arts, one has to distinguish between the
modern and the modernist, starting from the assumption that a writer
producing his work during modern times does not necessarily have to
write in a modernist way, but might prefer to be the continuator of
some already established tradition. (see David Lodge, The Modes of
Modern Writing - 1983 and Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction -
1992)
With regard to the novel, tradition on the modern stage is almost
synonymous with realism which, together with reality, is a central, though

ERNISM
controversial, issue. To underline the transformations having occurred
within the realist trend in novel writing, the relationship between art and
life is the essential aspect to be taken into consideration. From Plato
and Aristotle to the beginning of the nineteenth century, art had to
imitate life, to tell the truth about it and, if possible, to contribute to
making it better; starting with the nineteenth century, life is the one
expected to imitate art (Oscar Wilde) and not the other way around
and, since the reality one perceives is composed by mental structures
that are cultural, not natural in origin, it is most likely to witness
change and renewal in artistic structures rather than dream of having
anything altered for the better within the real context; additionally, art
may very well imitate other art, especially of the same kind (T. S. Eliot),
becoming autonomous.
Modernist fiction has the liberating effect of delivering us from the
perils of becoming immersed in a text and not being capable of
discerning the world from the world as we are made conscious of it. It
is no longer life but an image of it, whose structure remains to be
analysed, and thus the difference between life and art lies in technique.
Denying most, if not all, the values of the realist novel proper
(working to conceal the art by which it is produced and inviting to
discussion in terms of content rather than form, ethics rather than
poetics and aesthetics), the modernist novel pursues the real but
distorts the discourse until it bears less and less resemblance to the
historical description of reality (which provides the main non-literary
model for literary realism).
The principal distinction and improvement at the same time that
the new kind of fiction brings forth is language and technique,
embedded in the broader experimental frame that displays marked
deviations from pre-existing modes of discourse, literary and nonliterary.
Such a fiction is concerned with consciousness, and also with the
subconscious and unconscious workings of the human mind. Hence, the
structure of external objective events essential to traditional narrative
art is gradually diminished in scope and scale, presented selectively
and obliquely or even neglected and dismissed as irrelevant for the
underlying purpose: introspection, analysis, reflection, reverie.
A modernist novel discards the real beginning or the clear-cut
ending, plunging directly into a flowing stream of experience with which
the reader gradually familiarises himself by a process of inference and
association that, in an absurd manner, leads him nowhere (doubt
overwhelms when being confronted with a usually open, multiple or
ambiguous ending offering no solutions regarding the final destiny of
the characters). To compensate for the diminution of narrative structure
and unity, alternative methods of aesthetic ordering become more
prominent, such as allusion to or imitation of literary models or mythical
archetypes, and the repetition and/with variation of motifs, images,
symbols – a technique described as rhythm, leitmotif or spatial form.
Modernist fiction no longer chronologically arranges its material, no
longer makes use of a reliable, omniscient and intrusive narrator. It
employs instead either a single, limited point of view, or multiple ones,
more or less limited and subjective; and it tends towards a fluid,
complex handling of time that involves much cross-referencing and
shifts backwards and forwards across the chronological span of the

ON MODERNISM
action. Its predominantly heterodiegetic discourse is endebted to factual
discourse, in:
 the use of verbs expressing mental processes, associated with a
different voice than the narrator‟s
 the introduction of anaphoric markers without antecedent (characters
being presented directly, by a personal pronoun)
 the use of situational verbs with remote events or indefinite ones
 a massive introduction of dialogues having taken place long before
the narrative event
 numerous spatial deictics linked to a third person and the
combination of temporal deictics with the past tense or the past
perfect.
The contamination between the two reduces them to secondary
traits as compared to the paratextual indices that imply intentionality
(the status of fiction revealing the pragmatics of the discourse before
syntax or semantics). The discourse of the world becomes the discourse of
the word, incapable of referring unilaterally, multiple and fluid, offering
options rather than trapping into a universal signified.
Modernist fiction is considered to be more appropriate for academic
practice and research than certain of genuine popularity. The opponents of
modernism accuse it of an obsessive preoccupation with form which seems
to hide the lack of substance and content. They also imply that it
discriminates between different types/classes of readers, when the current
trend is that of mass cultural production facilitated by the new media.
However, modernist fiction does have the merit of innovating, stimulating and
challenging – reason enough for it to be accepted as a constituent part of a
developing world in search of discovering more suitable forms of expression
at all levels, the literary one included.
The modernist writer, in flight from „real‟ reality, seeks refuge into the
inner dimension (where a harmonious universe becomes possible), or alters
the existing order (by limiting perspectives, reversing trends or, more
importantly choosing to shock out of complacency); the result is a novel
whose premises are the following:
 all previous writing is outmoded and stereotyped
 technical innovation is a necessary evil
 progress asks for norms to be broken
 freedom lies between extremes
 originality resides in deviation from reader expectation
 art should represent itself, as the ultimate reality worth mirroring
 description needs to be replaced by allusion
 thoughts and feelings are the best reflectors of the world around
 convention is questioned by themes chosen
 extensive use of myth, symbol and archetype
 the viewpoint of the artist is necessarily brought forth
 individual consciousness is placed under focus
 estrangement from religion, science, philosophy
 assuming the avant-garde
 primacy of the cerebral over the emotional
 raising problems rather than solving them
 interest in the process of writing itself
 open-endedness as an invitation at excluding formal perfection

ERNISM
This modernist modern novel deliberately loses touch with the
everyday world, not only by ceasing to write about it, but by ceasing to write
about anything in ways easily accessible to the majority. (Randall Stevenson,
Modernist Fiction, 1992: 213) Demonstrating and discussing both the
potential and the limitations of language and narrative, it advances disturbing
representations of itself as a consequence of the ruin and desolation in the
world, which eludes assimilation in familiar words or literary forms.
1.2. Early Modernism (James, Forster, Conrad)
The novel that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century from the
ashes of the Victorian literary scene (no longer felt as matching or appropriate
for the changing world) was one that trespassed frontiers previously
respected, that brought the very local, national and parochial English novel of
the nineteenth century centre stage within the broader international context of
the time.
It turned the literary practices and techniques of the past upside down and
inside out, it voiced new ideals and drew up a new philosophy of life and art.
The transformations suffered became very obvious at the macro-structural
level of each and every novel, and the literary-theoretical writings of the
modernists kept returning to the innovations promoted, while at the same time
parodying what they considered to be the absurdly old fashioned realism of
the realists. All this may be summed up as follows:
VICTORIANISM MODERNISM
Setting
 predominantly English  involves other „nesses‟
 presupposes an external quality  moves inwards to the subtler,
(being an illustration of the world profounder inner dimension (of thought
outside) and feeling)
 is used to draw characters (the latter  is opposed to characters (the latter are
are constituent parts of the settings) usually misfits, at war with alien settings)
 harmonious, whole, offering bird‟s  discrete, limited, narrow, fragmented,
eye views sum of stimuli
Plot
 carefully built  broken, deconstructed
 logical and chronological (from the  does not observe logic or
exposition stage to dénouement) chronology (reverses traditional
order)
 running parallel to the story level  at times, absent altogether
Characters
 metonymical (standing for classes,  individuals / individualities
groups)
 dynamic, involved in events  static, meditative
 in close relationship with the world  in flight from „real‟ reality, isolated,
around trapped
 portrayed from an external, objective  portrayed from within, subjectively
standpoint therefore
 physical development under focus  spiritual maturation observed
 (bildungsroman)  (kűnstlerroman)
ON MODERNISM
Time
 objective, historical, logical,  subjective, fluid, elastic, the time of the
chronological (moving from the past, mind/heart (allowing free movement
through the present, to the future) backwards and forwards)
 observed at the level of the narrative  disrupting narrative chronology
pattern also (analeptic, sylleptic and proleptic textual
spaces)
Narrative Technique
 basically objective  mainly subjective
 first person autobiographical or third  first and third person limited, interior
person omniscient monologue or free indirect discourse
 no abrupt changes of narrative  shifting, multiple viewpoints
perspective
 separate narrative levels  juxtaposed, interrelated layers of
narration
1.3. Experimentalism (Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence)
The experimental novel in English developed during the inter-bellum

period, under three main international influences:
 the Russian analysis of the inner dimension (with Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky,
Chekhov)
 the symbolism of American poetry (with Eliot, Pound)
 the French concern with style and structure (with Flaubert, Maupassant,
Zola)
It opposed the traditionalists‟ exclusive concern with external reality
and the social situation of characters, growing around the following
tendencies:
 stream of consciousness oriented fictional discourse
 mythic symbolism
 polyphonic constructions of the self
Writers like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and David Herbert Lawrence
innovate, to varying degrees, character drawing above everything else. They
make setting and time secondary and rethink the importance of plot in the
forwarding of their texts.
Documents of a world of shaky values and uncertainty, their novels
stare taboo in the face and reconstruct, from fragments, worlds in which the
reader may discover at least some surviving principle, with which he/she may
empathise. In other words, using a broken mirror to reflect external space,
the experimentalists turn to the inner space for preference, where the pieces
fall back in place and where the self becomes significant.
With regard to time, these novelists start from assuming that it may be
defied and agree, with Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson, that the past can
be exhumed through dreams or recovered through memory. They
consequently oppose the emblem and symbol of the clock – entirely
regulating life and embodying the new rule of the machine – and move away
from the impositions of strict chronology into a subjective temporal order.
Modernist fiction‟s „temporal autonomy‟, its reshaping of structures and
styles, may free narrative as far as possible from time on the clock, but such
freedom could neither be absolute nor altogether continuously sustained. The

ERNISM
old clock ticked on within modernism‟s new chronologies. This leaves
inmodernist literature a conflicting, double awareness; of two separate, even
antithetical views of time and life – a double awareness shared by other
phases of contemporary culture, and in some ways by the age as a whole.
(Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 1992: 124) Obvious with all three
novelists, this split serves their oblique metafictional purpose of parodying
outmoded realist modes of writing and of preaching in favour of their being
replaced with newer experimental ones summing up the anxiety with and
rebellion against the convention and prejudice accumulated in the collective
unconscious.
The centrality of art in the novel is also observable in its gradual
metamorphosis from the traditional popular form of the bildungsroman to the
modernist experimental künstlerroman. While the former follows the growth
of the individual towards maturity, the latter focuses on the artistic, spiritual,
intellectual development of one character or more. The protagonists of the
modernist-proper novel are not simply involved in daily life, but retreat from it
to meditate on it, to give it coherence in terms of vision, to come out a better
person at the end of the day.
The parallelism actual life - intellectualised experience further gets
reflected in the establishing of two different selves by means of language
(see Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will): one which can be made to belong
to language (defined, solidified, visible, but falsified) and one which runs
deeply, continuously, beyond the reach of words (slippery, in constant
change, impossible to define, but real). Both may be grasped by plunging into
the depths of the modernist text and, from there, into the depths of human
psychology, THE subject and object of its forwarding.

ON MODERNISM
Chapter 2 - REPRESENTATIVE NAMES AND TITLES
Chapter 2 – Representative Names and Titles
2.1. Henry James
 born in New York, in 1843

 grew up in a highly educated environment: his father - a writer on
philosophy and theology; his brother, William - a philosopher and
psychologist
 educated both in the United States and Europe
 adopted British citizenship one year before his death, in 1915
 novels: Roderick Hudson (1876), Daisy Miller (1877), The Europeans
(1878), Washington Square (1881), The Portrait of a Lady (1881); The
Bostonians (1886), The Princess Casamassima (1886), The Tragic
Muse (1890); The Spoils of Poynton (1897), What Maisie Knew (1897),
The Awkward Age (1899), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The
Ambassadors (1903), The Golden Bowl (1904)
 ghost story: The Turn of the Screw (1898)
 essay: The House of Fiction (1957)
 travel writing: The American Scene (1907)
 autobiography: A Small Boy and Others (1913), Notes of a Son and a
Brother (1914), Terminations (1917)
 died in 1916
Henry James‟s career as a novelist began and ended with works

concentrating on the now famous „international theme‟, attempting to place
the focus of emphasis on the clash between two worlds and two world
outlooks: America(n) and Europe(an). The former is associated with
innocence, purity, newness but also with naїvity and lack of culture/values,
while the latter stands for tradition, elegance, sophistication but also for sin,
vice and decadence. Rooted in James‟s personal experience as an American
in Europe, this interest in opposing universes is thoroughly developed and
exploited so as to allow the analysis of modes of expression, patterns of
thought and behaviour, the psychology of characters, human nature in a
nutshell. (Daisy Miller, Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady; What
Maisie Knew, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden
Bowl)
Other texts deal predominantly with more traditionally English themes or
with the theme of the artist, whose credo and status James has always
brought to the attention of his readers although, most often than not, in a
highly allusive and oblique way, covertly metafictional. (The Bostonians,
The Princess Casamassima, The Tragic Muse)
James‟s fiction has developed at the crossroads of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, of tradition and innovation, of realism and modernism. If,
in the early novels, he still preserves a certain amount of literary realism (with
external conflict and minute representations of the outer, material world), in
the novels of maturity he transfers the emphasis to the plane of
consciousness, to the moral dramas unfolding beneath the surface, on the
slippery ground of the inner dimension.

ERNISM
His name is now associated with psychological realism, whose very
nature is anchored in both literary movements. He builds a subjective, rather
static novel, principally aimed at bringing subtle metamorphoses of the self to
the foreground.
The omniscient perspective is given up in favour of the subjective, limited,
shifting and multiple point of view, and only a certain amount of objectivity is
preserved by the careful manipulation of detachment, distancing or
éloignement.
The characters who take turns to focalise and/or narrate share with their
creator an awareness of the situation in which they find themselves, an
almost aesthetic appreciation of their roles within an intrigue (Douglas Hewitt,
English Fiction of the Early Modern Period, 1994: 15) The central
character is usually situated between mirrors, constantly interchanging and
presenting different facets at work within human nature. The characters
functioning as mirrors or reflectors are carefully manipulated so as to reveal
as much information and as many positions as possible in the particular
circumstances of the novel‟s narrative thread. They are commonly endowed
with a superior kind of intelligence, being capable of making value
judgements with regard to the people, places and events they are confronted
with. It is ultimately through their consciousness and sensibility that the
reader has access to the story built in.
In this respect, Henry James mentions a certain „instinctive disposition‟ he
has for placing advantageously, placing right in the middle of the light, the
most polished of possible mirrors of the subject […] These persons are, so
far as their other passions permit, intense perceivers, all, of their respective
predicaments. (in Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 1992: 19)
Like the majority of the modernists, Henry James does not only write
fiction, but theorises on the very nature of fiction in general and of his fiction
in particular in the literary essays that he publishes. One such text is The Art
of Fiction, where the novel as art is the central point of attention. For James,
the novel‟s aim is not that of criticising, moralising, preaching or instructing; it
is that of constituting itself in the perfect ground for openly dealing with any
aspect of life (including the skeletons in the Victorian‟s closet, taboos in a
word).
The realism James pleads in favour of is one which combines scientific
premises and artistic awareness, therefore it has to do sooner with the reality
of fiction rather than with the reality in fiction. To this end, he prefers to
concentrate on character evolution and evaluation than on the intricacies of
plot. Added is an analytic tendency directed towards the innermost springs of
human consciousness.
Still caught between Victorianism and Modernism, Henry James uses
nonetheless the latter to fight its predecessor. His texts bear traces of
theorizing on the nature and means of modernism in fiction. There are subtle,
but numerous references to and illustrations of the benefits of the newer
practices as against the old: the pictorial, descriptive method of the Victorians
is replaced by the introduction of short, intense dramatic scenes which
include dialogues as actions; the „grand narratives‟ give way to „petits
histoires‟ which carry a much deeper emotional and ideological charge than
their counterparts; the horizontal structure is not abandoned, but is enriched
with a vertical, depth structure with juxtaposition, collage and montage as key
factors; the objective, God-like attitude and altitude is brought off its pedestal
and the limited, subjective narrator/focaliser is given credit instead.

ON MODERNISM
The Portrait of a Lady
One of the novels belonging to Henry James‟s early period of creation,

The Portrait of a Lady formulates its author‟s credo and philosophy. Rooted
in its author‟s personal experience and choosing a woman/feminine presence
for its centre, it is humanly and artistically fertile, speaking of secret selves
and social imposition, while looking into appropriate artistic modes for
expressing them. Described by many as far-fetched or artificial, too much
preoccupied with the upper classes and the well off, it is however deliberately
so; illuminating on the internal drama of the human psyche is only possible
and justifiable if the choice of characters is appropriate and they are people
who are free from material worry and pressure.
The novel develops the international theme, while simultaneously
focusing on an intelligent character who comprehends experience and who is
articulate enough to depict all events and actants in detail, to plunge into the
subtleties of conversation and its pragmatic functions. It presents Isabel
Archer‟s spatial journey from America to Europe and her spiritual illumination
as a result of having entered a cultural other. Caught between parallel mirrors,
the young woman finds it difficult to know who she is, what she wants or,
more importantly it seems, how the others perceive her.
Isabel comes to Europe accompanied by her aunt, Mrs. Touchett. The
Old Continent is full of surprises for her. The cultural image she had built of it
lingers in her mind until it is to be shattered by the unfortunate experiences
she is to be subjected to. The moment she emerges from the States, Isabel
is readily labelled as strange, independent and naïve. As the novel unfolds,
Isabel is gradually shown as unaware of the way in which she is looked upon,
then as striving to convince others of their misjudging her, and finally as
having accepted the new (for her) European social norms which she now
begins to analyse, interpret and find possible cures for. Her journeys through
the continent that now has a direct effect upon her help her along in her
quest for the real, multi-faceted woman underneath the socially imposed
mask and inform the reader on the writer‟s own plight to uncover human
nature in the raw.
In her attempt at finding a secure social status and at being accepted by
society, Isabel searches for a husband. Nonetheless, from the numerous
eligible men around she is to pick the wrong one: Gilbert Osmond. On
hearing that Isabel has inherited a fortune from her cousin Ralph Touchett,
Osmond (himself an American, but already contaminated by the European
conventional, artificial values, from having spent too much time there),
together with Madame Merle or, better still, manipulated by the lady, accepts
to begin courting Isabel so as to provide himself and his illegitimate daughter
by Madame Merle (Pansy) with a considerable dowry.
The victim of a carefully knit plot and of her own youth, beauty, innocence
and wealth, Isabel embarks on a meandering journey through life. Caught in
a loveless marriage, constantly cheated and lied to, utterly unhappy, she
seeks refuge in her own thoughts, within the inner dimension, which is thus
explored by James with a view to formulating his oblique, though biting,
philosophy of life in the wilderness of the social milieu.
Manipulating plot on different levels and to different degrees, James
builds a panoramic view of the world and (wo)man within it, while at the same
time abandoning the traditional path in fiction, by numerous incursions into
ERNISM
the complex web of human feeling and thought. His style, diction and
sentence structure (asking of efforts on the part of the reader) illustrate the
content and message better than any authorially intrusive passages or clear
explanatory notes might ever hope to.
The ending of the novel conforms to the already established pattern,
being partly open (laying the burden of interpretation on the reader); it is
nonetheless optimistic, presenting the possibility of Isabel‟s finally having
found the right path in life after numerous and tiresome journeys through
Europe and the labyrinth of her mind and soul. Caspar Goodwood shows up
at the residence of Isabel‟s only true friend (Henrietta Stackpole) looking for
Isabel, whom he loves, and who obviously loves him back. At first sent away,
he is then stopped from departing, which allows the reader to infer that a
possible reunion lies ahead.
2.2. Edward Morgan Forster
 born in London, in 1879

 educated at Tonbridge School and King‟s College, Cambridge
 lived in Italy and Egypt, spent some years in India (1912, 1921)
 lectures at Cambridge: Some Aspects of the Novel
 one of the founders and leading figures of the „Bloomsbury Group‟, together
with Virginia Woolf and others
 novels: Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey
(1907), A Room with a View (1908), Howard’s End (1910), A Passage to
India (1924), Maurice (1971, posthumously)
 collections of short stories: The Celestial Omnibus (1914), The Eternal
Moment (1928), The Life to Come (1972, posthumously)
 collections of essays: Abinger Harvest (1936), Two Cheers for
Democracy (1951) – on politics, literature and society
 autobiography: The Hill of the Devi (1953) – on his experiences in India
 literary criticism: Aspects of the Novel (1927)
 died in 1970
Edward Morgan Forster‟s literary work primarily belongs to the realist

mode of writing; his ideas, however, are sooner to be associated with the
liberal tradition. An Englishman caught within the Englishness of his national
past and literary tradition, he begins rebelling against outmoded patterns of
thought and behaviour, and helps to form the „Bloomsbury Group‟ – whose
members dedicated a lot of time and effort to the raising of consciousness
towards the necessity of change, innovation, the break with the past,
modernism in a word. He remains therefore only partly anchored in the
legacy of Victorianism, with his concern for minute descriptions of setting and
his keen interest in criticising (however obliquely) the society of the
nineteenth century.
Forster‟s dominant theme is that of the habitual conformity of people to
unexamined social conventions. It forms the basis for elaborate discussions
on the condition of the individual as trapped „under the net‟ of prejudice, norm,
rule – all of which prevent him/her from making choices, including choices
about their own lives. The cures Forster finds to annihilate the negative
impact of the constraints imposed by society are free intelligence and
spontaneous life. In other words, he builds characters whose steps are

ON MODERNISM
initially guided along by everything and everyone but themselves, but who
eventually manage to find it in themselves to rebel against imposition and,
after having thoroughly meditated on their situation, to behave and express
themselves as they consider fit and as suits their immediate impulse.
His early novels (Where Angels Fear to Tread, The Longest Journey
and A Room with a View) are social comedies with romantic implications,
being set in a world still governed by a sense of stability and equilibrium.
They forward conflicts of values, expose deeply rooted human foibles, and
portray a „wasteland‟ of spirituality and passion. Puppeteered through life by
forces beyond control or apprehension, their characters lose their grip on the
reality of existence and act in keeping with standards imposed from the
outside. The only beneficent (although accidental) decision they make is that
of travelling, of moving farther and farther away from familiar environments,
which allows them to reconsider previous beliefs and attitudes, no longer
coherent or worthwhile.
Forster‟s later works (Howard’s End and A Passage to India in
particular) are highly modernist, basically symbolist writings whose main
purpose seems to be that of offering glimpses into the intricacies of the
human heart as it is stirred by that which goes on outside. Doubly oriented
therefore, towards the inner, slippery world of intimate thoughts and feelings
(that is frequently repressed) and towards the outer universe (which
presupposes its own battlefields), these novels attempt to put together,
harmoniously, all the possible puzzles made up of the otherwise odd bits and
pieces which compose personal histories.
Both novels weave their stories around opposing principles, be they
social, historical, political, cultural, moral, or simply human. This organisation
of material into dualistic patterns (strengthened by correspondences between
people, backgrounds and events with symbolic consistency), whereby
opposed attitudes to life collide and their respective representatives fail in
various degrees, is a means to and end: that of bridging the gap by the
sudden realisation of the fact that conflicts of attitude which have never been
explained or fully recognized, but which have, nonetheless, damaged
people‟s growth and interfered with honest relationships need to be
eradicated, or at least understood as a danger that one can easily avoid if
aware of its presence.
Forster‟s merit resides consequently in his ability to construct,
deconstruct and reconstruct universes based on powerful experiences that
the characters, endowed as they are with a superior intellect and sensitivity,
analyse and use for their future development.
The sense of place is the stable, dominant feature governing the rest,
while time is the variant bringing changes in perspective as regards the
notion of belonging to a clearly defined category. In his exploration of
reactions to previously unknown stimuli (usually associated with the „other‟,
Forster raises expectations to then frustrate them by changing the mode
and/or applying different symbols, with different significances. For instance,
whenever a certain setting becomes readily synonymous with a number of
values, a character-as-alien (belonging to a different culture, representative
for another community, or simply mentally revisiting once familiar places) is
embedded in it so that the notion of otherness becomes central to the whole
situation.
At the level of the text itself, all this is achieved by the careful handling
of narrative technique; the traditional one is replaced, in the climactic points,

ERNISM
with the more experimentalist one of free indirect style, which allows for the
narrator to become one and the same with the narrated and for the
connection between worlds to be brought to attention. Actually, this idea of a
bridge, a link, a connection runs through the novelist‟s entire creation, and is
made explicit in the motto attached to Howard’s End: “Only connect”. It
reflects the writer‟s attempt at providing human nature with unity, at merging
body and soul, at achieving the complementation desired for so long. Other
writers (David Herbert Lawrence, for instance) were to look into the same
problem, suggesting that, since philosophers and scientists have failed, it is
the novelist‟s task to do so; therefore, Forster may be seen as part of a
tradition that was to grow and reach unimaginable proportions with the
experimentalists proper, as formulating a credo that was to serve his
followers and please readers in the years to come.
A Passage to India
Forster‟s mature work, A Passage to India, is neatly structured into

three parts, all of which unfold central symbols: The Mosque, The Caves and
The Temple. On the one hand, they run parallel to the three seasons in the
Indian year (the cold weather, the hot weather and the rains), on the other
they point to the multiplicity of India (from the linguistic, ethnic, religious,
cultural point of view). The India that the title announces and the novel
colonises is thus omnipresent, stamping the whole novel with what the West
perceives as its exoticism and eccentricity.
The Indian ingredient is what makes A Passage to India a refreshing
writing and reading experience, what distances Forster from the rather dull
modes and manners of his earlier work. At the other end, there stands
England, Britain, with all the cultural stereotypes one defines it in terms of:
rigidity, superiority, the Empire. It is used as a starting point, a pretext for the
journey to distant territories, for the obvious invitation to reconsider, with
Adela Quested, the inertia of the mainstream English literary tradition.
The central character, a woman, has the symbolical function of fertilising
the novel discourse and, as her very name suggests, begins a journey meant
to help her rediscover herself; the quest, however, is imposed on her, as she
is not aware from the very beginning of the need for change. Adela initially
seems to be content with who she is and what she represents, but as she
covers new ground and goes through totally new experiences, she becomes
wiser, more mature, is „in quest‟ rather than „quested‟ so to say. Her passivity
is replaced by dynamic activity the moment she understands that she had
been living a lie or a dream for years on end.
Adela travels to India to visit her fiancé, Ronny, accompanied by Mrs.
Moore, her future mother-in-law. Unaware of the powerful influence that this
country is to have on her, she imagines that she can contaminate India with
her Englishness rather than fall prey to its tremendously acute Indianness.
The imperial theme of the book may be gathered from its early pages, where
the comic tone adopted emphasises the condescending attitude of the
coloniser towards the colonised. The cultural clash that the two women,
together with many others, are subjected to makes them the victims of their
own misconceived ideas, of racial prejudice and incomprehension. The East
meets the West in Forster‟s novel to obliquely criticise mentalities deeply
rooted in the English tradition, but also to seriously pose problems regarding
false perceptions of someone else‟s truths.
ON MODERNISM
The climactic point of the novel presents the two women visiting the
Marabar Caves, whose dark, almost pagan setting stirs Adela‟s imagination
to such an extent as to determine her to believe that the Indian doctor
accompanying them, Dr. Aziz, is sexually aroused by her presence and that
he misbehaves. Adela‟s public denunciation of Aziz is followed by a trial that
Forster uses to present his whole philosophy of life and art against. Adela,
now confronted by the judges, has to decide whether she should confess to
her having been mistaken and to only having had a vision (due to her own
thoughts on the necessity of love in marriage), or whether she should
conceal the truth and firmly defend her position.
Through juxtaposing that particular moment from her past and her
courthouse present, Forster makes her reconsider both and reach the best
decision: that of admitting to having accused the young man unjustly and
being honest to herself above everything else. Baffled and confused,
everyone present is shocked to hear of human truths publicly confessed to,
maybe with the exception of Fielding, Forster‟s own voice in the novel, the
character who pronounces value judgements and sends to the novel‟s
ultimate purpose.
The ending suggests circularity and voices Forster‟s continuous
preoccupation with connections and links: the then and the now, the here and
the there, the me and the not-me, the good and the evil, life and death come
together after Mrs. Moore‟s death in the religious ceremony concluded by the
capsizing of a boat – which breathes uncertainty whether the worshippers are
shouting in wrath or joy while fireworks go off and rain spoils the decorations.
2.3. Joseph Conrad
 born in Poland, in 1857

 real name: Jósef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski
 brought up in a family of rich landowners
 after the death of his parents and the family ruin, went out at sea
 joined the crew of a French ship in 1874 and of an English one in 1878
 took British citizenship in 1884
 became qualified as a ship‟s captain
 travelled to the Mediterranean, South America, the Far East, Central Africa
 novels: Almayer’s Folly (1896), An Outcast of the Islands (1896), Lord
Jim (1900), Nostromo (1907), The Secret Agent (1907), Under Western
Eyes (1911)
 novellas: The Nigger of the Narcissus (1898), Youth and the End of the
Tether (1902), Heart of Darkness (1902), Typhoon (1903), Chance
(1914), Victory (1915), The Shadow Line (1917), The Arrow of Gold
(1919), The Rescue (1920), The Rover (1923), Suspense (unfinished)
 collections of short stories: Tales of Unrest (1898)
 collections of essays: Notes on Life and Letters (1921)
 autobiography: A Personal Record (1912)
 novels in cooperation : The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903)
 died in 1924
Conrad too may be looked upon as a writer very much indebted to

realism (like Flaubert and Maupassant). The type of reality that he
concentrates on is one to be associated with life. Conrad believes that the

ERNISM
novel should have the same effect on the reader as real life. For him, the
latter should be able to plunge into the reality of fiction without being aware
that he/she is reading a book. Furthermore, realism does not only reside in
the mimetic fiction of a text; it is also consistent with the reality of the text as
such, brought to attention and intended to innovate the traditional modes of
writing.
The device by which Joseph Conrad achieves his goal is known as
„progréssion d‟effet‟ and presupposes submerging the reader into a subtle
verisimilitude so that the text carries the story forward with increasing speed
and intensity. Nevertheless, the technique that Conrad employs is one that
announces, from the very beginning, the entrance to a constructed world of
story-telling.
Conrad might also be called a romantic, because of his constantly
juxtaposing the supernatural to the real, the fictional to the additionally
fictional, allowing his texts to gain in depth. His romanticism is further
observable in his preoccupation with framing stories and with the battle
between good and evil, life and death. Another such battle or opposition is
that between the neatly patterned, coherent microcosm of a ship‟s crew and
the loose, chaotic, absurd macrocosm of land society – formulating Conrad‟s
credo with regard to man and his place on earth and to be noted not simply
at the level of each individual writing, but with reference to his whole literary
output.
There is also Victorianism at work with Conrad, in that he remains
preoccupied with the exploration of moral issues, with their impact on
humanity as a whole and the individual taken separately.
But above anything else there is modernism, since he addresses
issues which have come to be central to the 20th century mind: the problem
of identity, the terror of the unknown (both within and without), the difficulty of
finding a secure moral base, political violence, economic oppression,
isolation and existential dread, guilt, uncertainty and lust. Modernism is also
obvious in the way he modifies and disrupts chronology, his time shifts not
simply presupposing flashbacks, but anticipation and flashforwards also.
Conrad uses narrators exclusively, introducing a particular kind of
narrator called the „witness‟ or „the secret sharer‟. His witnesses/secret
sharers are limit cases; they are placed at the border of different narrative
levels, being at once part of the story they are telling, and outside it,
passively watching its déroulement.
In as far as narrative technique is concerned, he makes use of a mixture
and/or succession of points of view which are to be associated with different
diegetic levels and his desire to relativise truth. The graphicality of the
technique may be seen in the use of simple inverted commas and double
inverted commas to suggest the juxtaposition of the levels and the frontiers of
fictionality.
Conrad may be additionally considered a symbolist, most of his novels
being rounded up as against a single symbol (his favourite are ivory, gold,
silver, diamonds, money – standing for evil and upturning the trend). His
symbolism is therefore reversed, intended to shock and instruct at he same
time.
His novels/novellas may broadly be grouped into two categories, in keeping
with the type of setting they presuppose: with sea settings (The Nigger of
the Narcissus, Lord Jim, Youth and the End of the Tether, Typhoon,

ON MODERNISM
Heart of Darkness); with diverse, land settings (Nostromo, The Secret
Agent, Under Western Eyes, Chance, Victory, The Rescue).
Linking setting with characters, the novelist plays with the reader‟s
expectations and shocks by finding unconventional solutions to extreme, out-
of-the-ordinary situations. For him, the tangible object world is less significant
than what is impalpable and lies within; the outer universe, despite its
realistic portrayal, functions only as a stimulus meant to trigger inner
reactions which are placed under the lens of scrutiny and which serve in
rounding up characters struggling to discover their true nature in the most
trying of circumstances and the strangest of environments.
Finally, it should be stated that it was out of Joseph Conrad‟s
adventurous life, that his fiction came – an exemplification of that particular
freedom of those who breathe it, who need it to feel at home in the world.
Like Ernest Hemingway, with whom he is often associated, Conrad anchors
his stories in his personal experience and the autobiographical vein of his
writings constitutes itself in a subtle politics of writing in the language of the
„other‟. Unlike Hemingway, however, Conrad experiments with fiction‟s own
structural mechanisms rather than with character building, style and subject
matter.
Heart of Darkness
Inspired by a voyage that Conrad took on the Congo around the 1890s,
the novella processes a historical reality: the exploitation and robbery of the
African peoples by the Europeans. It is suffused by an atmosphere of death
and decay, one that perfectly defines the rottenness at work within the social
and political systems of the time.
Central to the work is Marlow, the secret sharer, who tells the story of
Kurtz – a European who arrives in Africa as a young idealist imagining that
his task is that of bringing light into the African darkness and who stays on,
becoming a degenerated product of his own actual greed for power and
material wealth. Attracted by the ivory of Africa and aware of the naivity of the
locals, Kurtz is lured into the darkness of his own nature and slowly turns into
the embodiment of evil itself. His eventual death frees him of his condition
and illuminates on the meaning(lessness) of his life.
Marlow‟s task is that of narrator, but also that of narrated and narratee.
Following in Kurtz‟s footsteps, he begins by narrating, unconventionally,
about someone who lies ahead spatially and behind temporally. While he
makes a journey similar to Kurtz‟s, Marlow weaves stories about the latter
(that he hears on his way to Africa) into his own narrative and ends by
identifying himself with Kurtz – the subject and object of his queries. Their
finally meeting is a central point in the novella, since it brings about a
symbolical contamination and exchange: Kurtz‟s life in Africa induces the
death of Marlow‟s innocence and optimism, and Kurtz‟s death fertilises
Marlow‟s imagination which, in its turn, gives life to a second narrative in
reverse.
The journey backwards is doubled by another version of the story
already told, one that is more credible, being rooted in what the reader
understands is Marlow‟s first hand experience with Kurtz. Nevertheless,
Conrad does not stop here his experimenting with fiction.
The ending he provides his novella with, besides being double (like the
whole text), is open to interpretation and disillusioning for those who have
ERNISM
imagined it to have been anchored in any kind of traditional literary realism.
When Marlow goes to see Kurtz‟s fiancée – the woman he had left behind
and who had desperately waited for him to return or to at least send her a
brief message – he finds himself in the difficult situation of either lying to her
or breaking her heart. When she wants to know whether Kurtz‟s last words
had been of her, Marlow‟s only choices are to tell her the truth, and utter the
terrible pronouncement that had sealed Kurtz‟s final passage – „“The horror!
The horror!” (Heart of Darkness, 1999: 97) – or to tell her that, indeed, her
name had been on his lips during that ultimate moment. He makes the
second choice which, for the reader, is not only humane or commonsensical,
it is also bitter ironical, cynical and obliquely metafictional. It invites at
reconsidering the text from yet another standpoint, which seems to have
been Conrad‟s intention all along.
This double-layered narrative, presupposing a frame and an
embedded story, two plots and two interchanging roles therefore, is one in
which Joseph Conrad‟s art as a modernist may be seen at work in the
context of his contemporary age and against prejudices of all kinds: social,
political, cultural, literary.
Its realism lies in that it offers glimpses into how truths are perceived in
reality, how they are constructed, how they are manipulated to serve
individual purposes.
Its reversed symbolism demolishes pretentions and disturbs the inertia that
has led to perceiving the external other in negative terms, without any
thorough consideration of the otherness that lies within.
A book about the fascination with evil, experienced intellectually by
Marlow and sensuously by Kurtz, Heart of Darkness uses the colour white
to denote that evil which the West automatically associates with the black. It
formulates a politics that transgresses the frontiers of space, of race and
defines man at war with himself, with that which, unless annihilated, or at
least acknowledged, threatens to destroy the precarious equilibrium which,
for the time being, maintains us all afloat.
2.4. Virginia Woolf
 born in London, in 1882

 novels: The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), Jacob’s Room
(1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando: A
Biography (1928), The Waves (1931), The Years (1937), Between the
Acts (1941)
 essays: Books and Portraits (1904), The Common Reader: First Series
(1925), The Common Reader: Second Series (1932), A Room of One’s
Own (1929), The Death of a Moth (1942), The Moment (1947), The
Captain’s Death Bed (1950), Granite and Rainbow (1958)
 biography: Flush: A Biography (1933), A Writer’s Diary (1953, published
by Leonard Woolf)
 short stories: A Haunted House (1943)
 died in 1941
A member of the Bloomsbury Group (together with Clive Bell – art
critic; Roger Fry – art critic and painter; John Maynard Keynes – economist;
Lytton Strachey – historian; Leonard Woolf – writer and publisher; Vanessa
(Stephen) Bell – painter; Duncan Grant – painter; Desmond MacCarthy –

ON MODERNISM
journalist and editor; Adrian Stephen – psychoanalyst; Saxon Sydney-Turner
– civil servant), Virginia Woolf has played an active part on the intellectual
scene of the early twentieth century. Like the other members of the group
that made the London district enter literary history, she was committed to the
rejection of the strictures and taboos of Victorianism on religious, artistic,
social, and sexual matters, and took steps towards implementing a new
politics of liberation from the yoke of the past.
The writer has contributed to the development of the art of fiction. As a
critic, she excels in conveying the impression made by an author or a work
upon the receptive and cultivated mind. Both her fiction and her non-fictional
writing create a vivid impression on the joys and the agonies of creative art.
Inside her novels the characters, when not actually involved in artistic
enterprises, use their extraordinary gifts of sensitivity and insight to look
beyond the surface of things and re-create volatile but beautiful worlds to
replace the material one.
She deliberately experiments with the form of the novel, minimising
the importance of facts, events and character analysis in order to concentrate
on the moment by moment experience of living: intense, rewarding, summing
up the essence of existence and transcending spatial and temporal
boundaries. Eliminating the author as narrator or commentator, Woolf‟s prose
directly accesses consciousness, and rediscovers refracted images of the
self projected on the background of the twentieth century alienating history.
Narrative consciousness functions therefore as a silent camera creating
perspectives which constitute stories. It looks toward a centre of
transcendent meaning which is finally discovered in the silence between the
acts of the personal and the social dramas and, above all, in the mysterious
power of consciousness to conceive such a drama. All this is foregrounded
by characters who are allowed to „speak‟ their minds and blur the distinctions
between the factual and the fictive.
Melting away the pre-modern rounded character, logically articulated
plot and solidly specific setting, Virginia Woolf‟s novels share the following
characteristics:
 the climax of the plot is pushed to its margins, leaving a disturbing empty
space to be gradually filled in
 the minds of characters with limited knowledge are placed at the centre,
subjectivity assuming the manipulative roles of showing and telling
 the narrative business inheres in repetitive symbolical structures which hide
the simile and metaphor embroidery
Her novels may also be described as autobiographical, in the sense
that they:
 exorcise childhood traumas (being brought up without a mother, living
under the shadow of a rigid and powerful father figure etc)
 hide underneath the parchment of the fictional, matching worries of the real
(insanity and death)
 have the liberating effect of a therapeutic cure consisting in mastering fears
and pronouncing the unutterable
 reflect on woman and womanhood under the crossfire of inertia and
progress
Another connection usually made with the writer‟s works is that of
feminist preoccupations. Ranked among the first feminists in English
literature, Virginia Woolf strives to find a way out of the male governed
language and, aware of the difficulties, analyses the process itself. „I have the

ERNISM
feelings of a woman,‟ says Bathsheba in Far from the Madding Crowd, „but
I have only the language of men.‟ From that dilemma arise infinite confusions
and complications. Energy has been liberated, but into what forms is it to flow?
(Men and Women, in Books and Portraits, 1977: 44) The question is not
simply a rhetorical one. Answers are provided inside the textuality of her texts
– poetic, symbolic and metaphorical, femininely fertile. Romantically
exploring abyssal states of mind and discovering the mystery of human inner
experience in correlation with the external universe, Woolf manages abstract
identifications with its „values‟, which unleash profound considerations of the
nature of fiction and woman inside it rather than part of a social network of
impositions and misattributed roles.
Mrs. Dalloway
A novel which chronologically covers a twenty-four hour span, Mrs.

Dalloway presents nonetheless a lifetime of glimpsed moments and
recollections in the life of Clarissa Dalloway – the older, more mature version
of the Clarissa in The Voyage Out. The day is spent making arrangements
for the party they are having in the evening for Richard‟s friends and
acquaintances. The days revisited are those of her youth, long gone, but
magically present in her thoughts.
The setting is London – urban, crowded, bustling with life, but
imposing numerous forms of death. Symbolical are: Big Ben – standing for
the authority of time; the Houses of Parliament – for the authority of the law,
Westminster Cathedral – for that of the church.
All these elements of the setting cast long shadows over Clarissa and
speak to the reader about the dangers of being crushed under the heel of
power structures, submerged into the uniformity of acceptance. They are also
embodiments of Victorian realities, of Victorian realism and of Victorian male-
governed traditions – that Virginia Woolf is careful to wittingly unmask. Or, as
she suggests in her Literary Geography: A writer‟s country is a territory
within his own brain; and we run the risk of disillusionment if we try to turn
such phantom cities into tangible brick and mortar. […] Of all the books
therefore the books that try to impress upon the mind the fact that great men
were once alive because they lived in this house or in that are those that
seem to have least reason for their being, for Thackeray and Dickens, having
done with earthly houses, live most certainly in our brains. (in op. cit.: 189)
In flight from the object world „objectively‟ portrayed, Mrs. Dalloway
brings the modernist alternative of presenting the materiality of the flow of
human thought triggered by external stimuli and its protagonist, caught in
between, narrates from both ends with the aid of free indirect style: in the
third person, from a distance, about the reflected „I‟.
Walking through London, buying flowers, giving orders to servants,
getting dressed or making polite conversation, Clarissa is permanently aware
that the automatism of her life can only be countered by the retreat into the
inner dimension. Middle aged and hollow deep down (despite her position,
wealth, marriage), she begins a journey inwards and backwards, hoping to
retrace the crucial moments in her past and re-make the decisions that have
brought her where she is today. Using men as mirrors, Clarissa puts together
the reflections of herself to reach some understanding of life, which she no
longer feels connected to.

ON MODERNISM
Her husband, Richard Dalloway, the man whom she had chosen for
the name and the status that he brought with him, cannot really see her and
therefore neither can she see herself in him. There is no true communion
between the spouses, who live under the same roof, but who are strangers to
each other. The opaque glass separating them is one of habit, of convention.
Peter Walsh, the man she had been in love with but had rejected out
of fear for the future ahead, gains in stature and positive features as her mind
embellishes the past by strict comparison with the meaninglessness of the
present. In him, she sees herself loved, happy and fulfilled.
Septimus Warren Smith is a young man Clarissa has never really met.
She has only passed by him in the street, but can perfectly read into his
transparency. He is mentioned by Dr. Bradshaw, the psychiatrist, at dinner
(as having committed suicide that very afternoon by throwing himself out of a
window) and she fully empathises with his fate, seeing her own alienation
avenged by his final gesture.
Looking deeper into Septimus‟s case, Clarissa fails to acknowledge
the part played by the war in the destruction of this „warren‟ character who is
no longer capable of drawing the line between his present and his past
involvement in the cataclysm. Haunted, like Septimus, by images and sounds
of another war, she is horrified to discover how attracted she has become to
death – that awaits her behind a window similar to the young man‟s: old age
in the near future.
The symbolic window, besides Septimus‟s actual one, standing for a
barrier, for the separation between worlds, is recurrent in the novel and it
serves to delineate between tradition and innovation, with an obvious
emphasis on the latter as life, opposing the death or deadly influence of the
former. Illustrative in this respect are the last pages of the book, which
present Clarissa meditating on life, death and timelessness while standing in
front of a window (or mirror) and looking across the street where, behind yet
another window, an old woman is silently turning off the light and going to
bed.
From early morning to late at night and from the early years to late
maturity, Clarissa Dalloway travels across wide spaces, although she seems
to be standing still, frozen in a posture photographers might envy. The party
almost over, her quest remains unfinished, postponed for the day to come.
2.5. James Joyce
 born in Rathgar, Dublin, in 1982

 educated at the Jesuit schools Clongowes Wood College and Belvedere
College, and at University College, Dublin.
 lived in Ireland, Italy, Switzerland and France
 poems: Chamber Music (1907);
 short stories: Dubliners (1914)
 a play: Exiles (1918)
 novels: A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man (1914-15), Ulysses
(1922), Finnegans Wake (1939)
 died in Paris, in 1941
James Joyce has revolutionised the form and structure of the novel in
the development of the stream of consciousness techniques which push
ERNISM
language to the extreme limits of communication. His fiction has been
praised and criticised, but it remains true that it has attracted the attention of
readers and critics alike. Described as forming an amazing maze which
entraps and disturbs, it leaves one to judge what is really underneath the
formal experimentation with words on the page. Reader-based therefore,
although very much anchored in the Joycean context, it speaks differently to
different addressees, forwarding the game and opening doors for accessing
disturbing paths.
Joyce has made considerable efforts to find new forms and new
symbols for the equally new patterns of experience. Working both on a grand
scale and a minute one, he has succeeded in catching the essence of man
diluted in/by the world he lives in. His literary achievements have been
ranked among the foremost realist, naturalist, experimentalist ones of the
western canon.
As a realist, James Joyce‟s observations are unerring, his concrete
representations remaining discernible even when covered by multi-layered
artifice. His characters exist in a kind of inevitable reality suggested by their
daily struggle with survival, by their constantly being at odds with external
impositions and inner drives.
As a naturalist, he exaggerates the apparently inessential, the
generally overlooked, to stir reactions and shape attitudes. His inward
journey beyond the surface of things is not only philosophical but medical,
surgical even – dissecting slices of life which carry traces of ourselves in
them.
As an experimentalist, Joyce seems more concerned with manner
than with substance. The many rhetorical devices and narrative techniques
he uses, together with the vocabulary he invents are distracting enough to
keep the reader busy with solving the puzzle thus formed and innovative
enough to demand attention and distance the reader from the actual content.
Linking idiom to character building, setting description and narrative
management, the writer constructs gravitational fields or spheres of influence
which are neither unique nor new, but are employed unusually frequently and
adroitly and extend unusually far. Joyce‟s idiosyncratic zones of language are
not used exclusively to reflect the sphere of influence of characters, but even
[…] to indicate certain linguistic idiosyncrasies associated with particular
places. (Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 1992: 48)
Joyce‟s writing has developed gradually, to reach its climactic point in
Ulysses, where spectacular modernist techniques are employed craftily
throughout. In Dubliners, his text remains fairly conventionally realistic,
containing satirical presentations of inert, paralysed Dublin. From the first
person narrative to free indirect style, the collection covers a variety of
practices, all aimed at disclosing the inner universe of each and every
protagonist without, however, illustrating the polyphony of the world in its
entirety. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the centre is formed by
the hero‟s consciousness, the realistic detail being given up, indirect
projections of the world around replacing them and composing the symphony
of voices heard, remembered or anticipated.
The structuring principle lying at the heart of James Joyce‟s fluid
fiction is that of epiphany (moment of artistic apprehension, which
concentrates states of intense revelation and illumination) – developed on,
metafictionally, in A Portrait. Inspired from Thomas d‟Aquinas‟s theory of the
conditions of beauty, epiphany is achieved through three stages: integritas

ON MODERNISM
(wholeness), consonantia (harmony) and claritas (radiance). They describe
the accessing of the contingent and its turning into potentially artistic,
valuable material: the thing is apprehended and isolated from surrounding
ones, it is then analysed in its constituent parts whose symmetry is
understood, and then further essentialised, therefore epiphanised, resulting
in a state of pleasure and delight with the onlooker. In other words, the writer
formulates an artistic credo, suggesting that there is beauty all around, or that
everything is worth being exploited in a work of art. This aesthetics of the
ugly and the unseen has found concrete formulations in James Joyce‟s
poetry and prose, one that has inspired many a writer in the years since.
Ulysses
A novel emblematic for the twentieth century, Ulysses anchors the

difficult now in the mythical then, revisiting tradition to explain modernity. It
reconstructs Homer‟s Odyssey and closely follows the latter‟s structure. To
provide a framework for his work, Joyce creates a list of correspondences to
run through the text. The „schema‟, as it is called, links a „scene‟, an hour, an
organ of the body, an art, a colour, a symbol and a „technique‟ to each of the
incidents he took from Homer. (David Pritchard, James Joyce, 2001: 103)
The eighteen chapters that make up the book have titles which correspond to
persons or episodes in the classical epic: Telemachus, Nestor, Proteus,
Calypso, Lotus Eaters, Hades, Aeolus, Lestrygonians, Scylla and Charybdis,
Wandering Rocks, Sirens, Cyclops, Nausicaa, Oxen of the Sun, Circe,
Eumaeus, Ithaca and Penelope. Central are three protagonists or character-
narrators: Stephen Dedalus (standing for Telemachus) Leopold Bloom
(standing for Ulysses), and Molly Bloom (standing for Penelope). Their
functional roles in the novel divide it into three broad sections, woven around
their person and consciousness.
Stephen is a young, intelligent graduate, whose artistic, philosophical
mind is on display, revealing all its thinking patterns, decorated with elevated
incursions into universal poetry, Irish folklore, Greek philosophy and Roman
Catholic liturgy, and with seemingly random references to obscure trivia. A
schoolteacher recently returned from Paris upon news of his mother‟s being
on her deathbed, Stephen is the autobiographical character, already
introduced in A Portrait, whose very name is symbolical for Joyce‟s condition
of an Irishman (Stephen being the name of an Irish martyr) and of a writer
(Dedalus pointing to the prototype of the artist, the maker of the beautiful and
ephemeral).
Leopold, unlike analytical Stephen, relates to the environment in a
sensual, bodily way. Middle aged, of Jewish origin, married to a woman who
cheats on him and suffering from the loss of a father and a newly-born son,
he is a misfit, cut off from the community he lives in but has nothing in
common with. He spends his day wandering the city streets (having forgotten
his keys and not wanting to disturb his wife): from the post office (to pick up
responses for his advertisement for a secretary), the chemist‟s (to buy Molly
soap and lotion), Glasnevin Cemetery (to attend a funeral), the newspaper
office (to work on his newest advertising assignment), the National Library (to
retrieve a specific graphic image), the Burton Restaurant and Barney
Kiernan‟s Pub (to have something to eat) and so on. This doomed wandering
Jew crosses paths with Stephen and eventually meets him, discovering in

ERNISM
him the son he has dreamed of, while he embodies the desired father for the
younger man.
Molly sums up all the other women characters in the novel. Various
aspects of womanhood (and their transformations) are taken up and
shockingly developed through this character notorious for her coarse
language and sexual frankness. In the last chapter of the book, Molly carries
out the narratorial task, offering new insight to her devious nature, in addition
to the clues already provided by Leopold‟s having meditated on her
infidelities and his unconditional love for her. Her interior monologue is the
most disturbing of all, thus illustrating the decadence of the present day and
the repercussions of the break with the morality and stability of the past.
The setting is Dublin, whose alleys, bridges and quays are perfectly
recalled by the writer living in Paris at the time. The labyrinth of the city
streets is symbolical for the numerous traps and dangers the narrative
confronts the reader with. The familiar is defamiliarised and refamiliarised, as
ancient myths are brought to life and made to fit the matrix of Joyce‟s
fictionalised, but accurately real Ireland.
Ulysses covers one day in objective temporal terms: the 16th of June,
1904. Subjectively however, the book takes us back and forth in time,
chronology being disrupted, rearranged, made to abide by the norms of a
different fluidity – that of the human mind, whose processes are emphasised
and help to guide along the narrative threads (or shreds). A revolutionary
literary effort, the novel playfully distorts its medium to capture the broader
picture envisaged. Its narrative does not simply convey the story; it often
shifts between a multitude of styles in order to alternate meanings, to
delineate resonances, to foreground ironies and to counterpoint themes. It
evolves from Anglo-Saxon and Latin roots, through nine stages of
development (represented by stylistic parodies of consecrated authors:
Shakespeare, Milton, Swift etc), to modern polyglot slang, thus bringing all
books into one and resuming the cultural heritage in its most prominent
instantiations.
2.6. David Herbert Lawrence
 born at Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, in 1885

 educated at University College, Nottingham
 lived in England, Italy, Australia, New Mexico
 novels: The White Peacock (1911), Sons and Lovers (1913), The
Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), Aaron’s Rod (1922), Kangaroo
(1923), The Plumed Serpent (1926), Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928,
expurgated edition)
 short stories: The Prussian Officer (1914), England, My England (1922),
The Woman Who Rode Away (1928)
 poems: Collected Poems (1928)
 essays: Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), Morality and the Novel
(1925), The Novel (1925), Why the Novel Matters (1936)
 died in Venice, in 1930
David Herbert Lawrence is the experimentalist who treats the inner

dimension with a view to exploring its emotional properties. His fiction

ON MODERNISM
transcends the round, finished portraiture of the nineteenth century novel and
replaces it with an intense feeling of actually living, with characters endowed
with passion and spontaneity – acting in keeping with instinct and impulse –
and seeking complementation, the achievement of the wholeness of being.
Otherwise said, he rejects conventional morality and favours nature
and the natural. Freed of inhibitions and detached from the bonds of society,
his characters have a naturalness (of thought, sentiment, speech and
conduct) which gratifies unspoken urges and desires in the reader. And his
fiction has been discarded, fought against, even banned from the market due
to this very obvious capacity to find appropriate wordings and representations
for taboos which, being forbidden, are accepted as generally true.
Lawrence‟s truths in fiction are thus related to essential human nature, to the
presentation of the alter-ego present in each of us but screened by the mask
of convention.
As he suggests in the critical essays, the novel is of a crucial influence
on the way we live. It allows free expression and establishes relationships
between man and the world around, be it human or natural. It teaches how to
be and preaches a superior morality, accepting that everything is true in its
own time, place, circumstance and false outside. Lawrence‟s texts posit
contexts within which feelings and reactions are generated, developed,
assumed, only to be replaced with others the minute additional factors
intervene. The close connection that exists between the inner and the outer
universes, between body and soul, body and mind is the hard core the
novelist keeps returning to so as to revolutionise both private life and the
sociology of English culture.
In the interplay of roles and identities that characterises his fiction, one
finds a constant return to childhood and the mythologies of class and family,
the autobiographical vein being more than obvious. Most of the situations
created are rooted in the Arthur Lawrence - Lydia Beardsall pattern. The
tension between his parents (the coarse coal miner and the refined school
teacher) is unleashed in various ways in the novels that he writes, and it is
usually the woman that is at once loved and feared, desired and rejected,
impossible to comprehend because complex and „other‟.
Lawrence‟s women dominate men and, in this reversal of power roles,
the formulation of pre-oedipal concerns and conflicts is forwarded: male
protagonists are usually smaller/younger than their female counterparts; the
women are potential mothers, absorbed in pregnancies or children; when
crossed, the women refer to their lovers as one does to babies or young
children; the women demand men‟s acknowledging that they depend on
them, while fighting the burden of this dependency; women are either very
possessive or recoil from connection into singleness etc.
To a world of severe changes, Lawrence adds another: that of the
necessary transformation of fiction so as to include the previously deliberate
omissions. In as far as narrative technique is concerned, Lawrence‟s writing
develops from a partly omniscient style to a more flexible one. If, in Sons
and Lovers, for instance, the shift from the objective to the subjective
materialises in descriptions of exfoliating inner feelings following lines of
conversation, in the later novels, like The Rainbow and Women in Love,
characters‟ feelings are dramatised in symbolic episodes which inform on
what the characters themselves cannot know, through their physical
reactions to the scenes/events witnessed. Another tactics developed is that

ERNISM
of adapting language to illustrate inner thought and the movements of the
psyche, noticeable in the free indirect speech pattern.
With reference to setting, Lawrence‟s is mostly associable with the
northern, industrial, mining district of Nottinghamshire, where he himself grew
up. Its bleak atmosphere, harsh living conditions, specific dialect help in
giving the local aura intended, in amplifying the need to escape and find
completion and fulfilment. As elsewhere in his life and fiction (with father
opposing mother, England - the rest of the world, body - soul, instinct -
rational thought), dualism is present in the setting also, with the industrial
surroundings having the agricultural setting as a counterpart. The choices
remain open, and the struggle to bring the two together is all that counts.
Sons and Lovers
This overtly autobiographical novel about the destruction of the

instinctual man by the spiritual woman has brought D. H. Lawrence literary
fame. Combining realistic descriptions of working class life in Northern
England with psychological studies and symbolical patternings, it follows the
evolution of Paul Morel from early childhood to young maturity. His
relationships with three powerful women (his mother – Mrs. Morel, Miriam
Leivers and Clara Dawes) are interwoven to reflect on different angles of the
protagonist, on his way to achieving maturity, much in the tradition of the
bildungsroman, but nuanced with glimpses into the minutest of movements of
inner consciousness in response to sentiments triggered by the outer world
and the people inside it.
The first part of the novel introduces the reader to the Morel family
environment: one of conflict due to the incompatibility between a physically
stronger man (leaving the wife in an apparent weak position) and an
intellectually superior woman (slowly driving the husband to a state worthy of
contempt). Paul‟s reactions are varied and communication rendered futile. He
wavers from love to hatred, silenced by the intensity of feeling and the shock
he experiences each time he attempts to come to grips with the adult world of
his parents. Nonetheless, he remains on his mother‟s side as, to him, she is
the victim. In her turn, the old woman clings to him, desperately searching for
consolation for the death of her other son, William, and for the loss of true
marital affection. Gradually, she becomes the victimiser, the suffocating
presence in Paul‟s life, which the latter accepts unknowingly.
The subsequent sections cover Paul‟s engaging with two younger
women, both of whom are barely enough for him to feel whole with, yet both
tremendously feared for their dominant streaks. Miriam stands for innocence,
virginity and the intellect, while Clara embodies experience, sexuality and
passion. Aware of the manipulative powers of such features, Paul is at once
captivated and terrified. In the end, he decides to abandon them both, to free
himself of their spell, although still possessed by that of his now dead mother.
The ending is open, awaiting answers to Miriam‟s unasked questions: Where
would he go? What would be the end of him? (Sons and Lovers, 1993: 445).
Struggling to achieve independence from all external stimuli and to
find personal and artistic fulfilment, Paul Morel seems to be Lawrence‟s own
spokesperson in the novel. He allows the formulation of a central Lawrencian
theme, that of the search for some relationship which is large enough to give
importance to personal feelings but which will transcend them. (Douglas
Hewitt, English Fiction of the Early Modern Period: 1890-1940, 1994: 179)
ON MODERNISM
This is the doctrine that the writer continues to be preoccupied with for the
rest of his life and that he includes in his fiction under one form or another.
In point of novel discourse, dramatic scenes are combined with
authorial comments, and vivid descriptions of natural objects are added to
sharp observations on human psychology, not so much to formulate general
truths as to represent immediate responses to real life situations with actants
and observers alike. Dynamic and subtle, Lawrence‟s writing presupposes
sudden modifications of viewpoint and abrupt transitions in narrative force. A
little inconsistent for some, it does however reflect mood changes and
reaction fluctuations which are characteristic of the slices of life caught under
the covers of the book.
In time and space, the novel moves with the autonomy of modernism:
the personal is broader than and overlaps the general it belongs to. A life
sums up all others, a region shrinks the world at large. Universal man
emerges, a new chronology is established and the territories covered are
endless. Past, present and future merge, life and death become one, and the
awareness of the self is finally a healing experience: He could not bear it. On
every side the immense dark silence seemed pressing him, so tiny a spark,
into extinction, and yet, almost nothing, he could not be extinct. Night, in
which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars
and sun, a few bright grains, went spinning round for terror, and holding each
other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them
tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core a
nothingness, and yet not a nothing. (Sons and Lovers: 446)

ERNISM
Chapter 3 - TESTS
Chapter 3 – Tests
Use the glossary of literary terms to decode the texts and find
appropriate solutions to the tasks formulated.
3.1. Test One
“Dear me, who is that strange 1. Consider the way in which, on

woman?” Mr. Touchett had asked. a small scale, the excerpt
“Perhaps it‟s Mrs. Touchett‟s develops the broader
niece – the independent young lady,” preoccupation of the novel with
lord Warburton suggested. “I think the clash between worlds and
she must be from the way she cultures.
handles the dog.”
The collie, too, had now allowed
his attention to be diverted, and he
trotted towards the young lady in the
doorway, slowly setting its tail in
motion as he went.
“But where‟s my wife then?” 2. Search for ironical stances
murmured the old man. and remarks that contribute to the
“I suppose the young lady has portrayal of the two worlds:
left her somewhere; that‟s a part of America and Europe.
the independence.”
The girl spoke to Ralph, smiling,
while she still held up the terrier. “Is
this your little dog, sir?”
He was mine a moment ago;
but you‟ve suddenly acquired a
remarkable air of property in him.”
“Couldn‟t we share him?” asked 3. Find the embedded criticism
the girl. He‟s such a perfect little addressed to European narrow
darling.” mindedness, preconceived ideas
Ralph looked at her a moment; and disregard of the ‘other’.
she was unexpectedly pretty. “You
may have him altogether,” he then
replied.
The young lady seemed to have
a great deal of confidence, both in
herself and in others; but this abrupt
generosity made her blush. “I ought
to tell you that I‟m probably your 4. Point to the use of the
cousin,” she brought out, putting dialogue as an intense, dramatic
down the dog. “And here‟s another!” scene or event.
she added quickly, as the collie came
up.
“Probably?” the young man
exclaimed, laughing. “I supposed it
Chapter 3 - TESTS
was quite settled! Have you arrived 5. Give examples of textual
with my mother?” details which might help in
“Yes, half an hour ago.” defining James’s style as
“And has she deposited you and cautious, therefore subjective.
departed again?”
“No, she went straight to her
room, and she told me that, if I
should see you, I was to say to you
that you must come to her there at a
quarter to seven.” 6. Analyse the reflections of
The young man looked at his Isabel offered by the other
watch. “Thank you very much; I shall characters as mirrors; refer to the
be punctual.” And then he looked at metamorphosis of cultural
his cousin. “You‟re very welcome stereotypes.
here. I‟m delighted to see you.”
She was looking at everything
with an eye that denoted clear
perception – at her companion, at the
two dogs, at the two gentlemen
under the trees, at the beautiful 7. Discuss the impact that this
scene that surrounded her. […] many-filtered presentation of
“Is one of those gentlemen your character has upon the reader.
father?”
“Yes, the elder one – the one
sitting down.” said Ralph.
The girl gave a laugh. “I don‟t
suppose it‟s the other one. Who‟s the
other one?” 8. Comment on narrative
“He‟s a friend of ours – Lord technique, specifying intentions
Warburton.” and repercussions.
“Oh, I hoped there would be a
lord; it‟s just like a novel!”
(adapted from Henry James, The

Portrait of a Lady, in Novels 1881-
1886, 1985: 204-205 9. What values may be
associated with femininity and
which with masculinity? How does
the text illustrate them?
10. How may the fiction/reality

borderline alluded to in the
excerpt be accounted for?

Chapter 3 - TESTS
3.2. Test Two
But the crisis was still to come. 1. Consider style, diction and
Adela had meant to tell the truth register in connection with
and nothing but the truth, and she setting.
had rehearsed this as a difficult task
– difficult, because her disaster in the
cave was connected, though by a
thread, with another part of her life,
her engagement to Ronny. She had
thought of love just before she went
in, and had innocently asked Aziz 2. Analyse characters as
what marriage was like and she embodying opposing worlds and
supposed that her question had world outlooks.
roused evil in him. To recount this
would have been incredibly painful, it
was the one point she wanted to
keep obscure; she was willing to give
details that would have distressed
other girls, but this story of her
private failure she dared not allude 3. Develop on the oblique social
to, and she dreaded being examined and political criticism that the
in public in case something came excerpt foregrounds.
out. But as soon as she rose to reply,
and heard the sound of her own
voice, she feared not even that. A
new and unknown sensation
protected her, like a magnificent
armour. She didn‟t think what had
happened, or even remembered in 4. Mention the roles played in
the ordinary way of memory, but she unfolding meaning by the spatial
returned to the Marabar Hills and and temporal juxtapositions.
spoke from them across a sort of
darkness to Mr. McBryde. The fatal
day recurred, in every detail, but now
she was of it and not of it at the same
time, and this double relation gave it
indescribable splendour. Why had
she thought the expedition “dull”? 5. Discuss narrative technique
Now the sun rose again, the elephant and give textual evidence in
waited, the pale masses of the rock support of your statements.
flowed round her and presented the
first cave; she entered, and a match
was reflected in the polished walls –
all beautiful and significant, though
she had been blind to it at the time.
Questions were asked, and to each
she found the exact reply; yes, she 6. Which is the connector in the
had noticed the “Tank of the Dagger”, text and what are its literary
but not known its name; yes, Mrs. functions?

Chapter 3 - TESTS
Moore had been tired after the first
cave and sat in the shadow of a great
rock, near the dried-up mud.
Smoothly, the voice in the distance
proceeded, leading along the paths
of truth, and the airs from the punkah
behind her wafted her on… […] 7. There are numerous figures of
“You went alone into one of speech in the text. Which is
those caves?” which?
“That is quite correct.”
“And the prisoner followed you.”
“Now we‟ve got‟im” from the
Major.
She was silent. The court, the
place of question, awaited her reply.
But she could not give it until Aziz 8. How obvious are the concepts
entered the place of answer. […] of spontaneous life and free
Her vision was of several caves. intelligence in the unfolding of
She saw herself in one, and she was events?
also outside it, watching its entrance,
for Aziz to pass in. She failed to
locate him. […] Speech was more
difficult than vision. “I am not quite
sure.”
“I beg your pardon?” said the
Superintendent of Police. 9. Discuss the text as being
“I cannot be sure…” climactic in the quest for the
“I didn‟t catch that answer.” He self.
looked scared, his mouth shut with a
snap. “You are on that landing, or
whatever we term it, and you have
entered a cave. I suggest to you that
the prisoner followed you.”
She shook her head.
“What do you mean, please?”
“No,” she said in a flat, 10. Point to Victorian and
unattractive voice. […] “I‟m afraid I modernist features of the text.
have made a mistake.”
“What nature of mistake?”
Dr. Aziz never followed me into
the cave.”
(adapted from Edward Morgan
Forster, A Passage to India, 1989:
247-248)
3.3. Test Three
„His was an impenetrable 1. Notice the simple and double

darkness. I looked at him as you inverted commas used. Mention
peer down at a man who is lying at their role in connection with the
the bottom of a precipice where the double-layered narrative pattern.
sun never shines. But I had not much
Chapter 3 - TESTS
time to give him, because I was
helping the engine-driver to take to
pieces the leaky cylinders, to
straighten a bent connecting-rod,
and in other such matters. I lived in
an infernal mess of rust, filings, nuts, 2. Pick out the autobiographical
bolts, spanners, hammers, ratchet- references in the text.
drills – things I abominate, because I
don‟t get on with them. I tended the
little forge we fortunately had aboard;
I toiled wearily in a wretched scrap-
heap – unless I had the shakes too
bad to stand.
„One evening coming in with a 3. Mention where and how subtle
candle I was startled to hear him say metafictional observations are
a little tremulously, “I am lying here in made.
the dark waiting for death.” The light
was within a foot of his eyes. I forced
myself to murmur, “Oh, nonsense!”
and stood over him as if transfixed.
„Anything approaching the
change that came over his features I
have never seen before, and hope 4. Analyse the unconventional
never to see again. Oh, I wasn‟t narrative practices and
touched. I was fascinated. It was as techniques.
though a veil had been rent. I saw on
that ivory face the expression of
sombre pride, of ruthless power, of
craven terror – of an intense and
hopeless despair. Did he live his life
again in every detail of desire,
temptation, and surrender during that 5. Focus on Marlow – as narrator
supreme moment of complete and protagonist; how does his
knowledge? He cried in a whisper at story tell of his own character?
some image, at some vision – he
cried out twice, a cry that was no
more than a breath –
„ “The horror! The horror!”
“I blew the candle out and left
the cabin. The pilgrims were dining in
the mess-room, and I took my place 6. Discuss the numerous
opposite the manager, who lifted his implications of Conrad’s reversed
eyes to give me a questioning symbolism as obvious in the
glance, which I successfully ignored. excerpt.
He leaned back, serene, with that
peculiar smile of his sealing the
unexpressed depths of his
meanness. A continuous shower of
small flies streamed upon the lamp,
upon the cloth, upon our hands and
faces. Suddenly the manager‟s boy 7. Observe the irony of tone and
put his insolent black head in the pinpoint its goals.
doorway, and said in a tone of
Chapter 3 - TESTS
scathing contempt:
„ “Mistah Kurtz – he dead.”
„All the pilgrims rushed out to
see. I remained, and went on with my 8. Develop on as many
dinner. I believe I was considered intertextual references as you can
brutally callous. However, I did not find.
eat much. There was a lamp in there
– light, don‟t you know – and outside
it was so beastly, beastly dark. I went
no more near the remarkable man
who had pronounced a judgement
upon the adventures of his soul on
this earth. The voice was gone. What 9. How may Kurtz’s last words be
else had been there? But I am of interpreted?
course aware that next day the
pilgrims buried something in a muddy
hole.
„And then they very nearly
buried me.
„However, […] I remained to
dream the nightmare out to the end, 10. Is there any proleptic force
and to show my loyalty to Kurtz once about the fragment above?
more. Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing
life is – that mysterious arrangement
of merciless logic for a futile purpose.
(adapted from Joseph Conrad, Heart
of Darkness and Other Stories,
1999: 97-98)
3.4. Test Four
“Good morning to you, 1. Which Woolfian theme might

Clarissa!” said Hugh, rather be extracted from the excerpt?
extravagantly, for they had known
each other as children. “Where are
you off to?”
“I love walking in London,” said
Mrs. Dalloway. “Really, it‟s better
than walking in the country.”
They had just come up – 2. Identify the autobiographical
unfortunately – to see doctors. Other references, keeping in mind both
people came to see pictures; go to the personal and the artistic.
the opera; take their daughters out;
the Whitbreads came “to see
doctors”. Times without number
Clarissa had visited Evelyn
Whitbread in a nursing home. Was
Evelyn ill again? Evelyn was a good
deal out of sorts, said Hugh, 3. Analyse the way in which
intimating by a kind of pout or swell shifts in time and perspective
of his very well-covered, manly, contribute to forwarding meaning.
extremely handsome, perfectly
Chapter 3 - TESTS
upholstered body (he was almost too
well dressed always, but presumably
had to be, with his little job at Court)
that his wife had some internal
ailment, nothing serious, which, as
an old friend, Clarissa Dalloway 4. Pick out the characteristic
would quite understand without features of the narrative technique
requiring him to specify. Ah, yes, she and give illustrative examples.
did of course; what a nuisance, and
felt very sisterly and oddly conscious
of her hat. Not the right hat for the
early morning, was that it? For Hugh
always made her feel, as he bustled
on, raising his hat rather
extravagantly and assuring her that
she might be a girl of eighteen, and 5. Notice the indirectness of
of course he was coming to her party character drawing and describe
to-night, Evelyn absolutely insisted, Hugh and Peter by rearranging the
only a little late he might be after the pieces of the puzzle.
party at the Palace to which he had
to take one of Jim‟s boys – she
always felt a little skimpy beside
Hugh, schoolgirlish; but attached to
him, partly from having known him
always, but she did think him a good
sort in his own way, though Richard
was nearly driven mad by him, and 6. Discuss Clarissa’s reflections
as for Peter Walsh, he had never to in/on the male other as mirror.
this day forgiven her for liking him.
She could remember scene
after scene at Bourton – Peter
furious; Hugh not, of course, his
match in any way, but still not a
positive imbecile as Peter made out;
not a mere barber‟s block. When his
old mother wanted him to give up 7. Focus on Clarissa as narrator,
shooting or to take her to Bath he did narrated and, at times, narratee.
it, without a word; he was really Say what you think the plusses
unselfish, and as for saying, as Peter and minuses of her multiple roles
did, that he had no heart, no brain, might be.
nothing but the manners and
breeding of an English gentleman,
that was only her dear Peter at his
worst; and he could be intolerable;
he could be impossible; but adorable
to walk with on a morning like this.
(June had drawn out every leaf
on the trees. […] Arlington Street and 8. Consider the actual and
Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very imaginary settings, specifying their
air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, implications.
brilliantly, on the waves of that divine
vitality which Clarissa loved. To
dance, to ride, she adored all that.)
Chapter 3 - TESTS
(adapted from Virginia Woolf, Mrs. 9. Are feminist positions

Dalloway, 1996: 7-8) expressed anywhere in the text?
Which? How are they obvious?
10. Find the embedded criticism

of English stereotypes. Develop on
the modernism attached to it.
3.5. Test Five
In long lassons from the Cock 1. Develop on the realism

Lake the water flowed full, covering /naturalism/modernism of the text.
green-goldenly lagoons of sand,
rising, flowing. My ashplant will float
away. I shall wait. No, they will pass
on, passing chafing against the low
rocks, swirling, passing. Better get
this job over quick. Listen: a
fourworded wave-speech: seesoo,
hrss, rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement 2. Discuss the role of the
breath of waters amid seasnakes, numerous figures of speech
rearing horses, rocks. In cups of present in the fragment.
rocks it slops: flop, slop, slap;
bounded in barrels. And, spent, its
speech ceases. It flows purling,
widely flowing, floating foampool,
flower unfurling.
Under the upswelling tide he
saw the writhing weeds lift languidly
and sway reluctant arms, hising up 3. Make special reference to the
their petticoats, in whispering water symbolism of water, under its many
swaying and upturning coy silver guises.
fronds. Day by day; night by night;
lifted, flooded and let fall. Lord, they
are weary; and, whispered to, they
sigh. Saint Ambrose heard it, sigh of
leaves and waves, waiting, awaiting
the fullness of their times, diebus ac
Chapter 3 - TESTS
noctibus iniursia patiens ingemniscit. 4. Extract the underlying theme.
To no end gathered; vainly then
released, forth flowing, wending
back; loom of the moon. Weary too
in sight of lovers, lascivious men, a
naked woman shining in her courts,
she draws a toil of waters. 5. Comment on the
Five fathoms out there. Full unconventional vocabulary and
fathom five thy father lies. At one he punctuation Joyce chooses to
said. Found drowned. High water at make use of.
Dublin bar. Driving before it a loose
drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes,
silly shells. A corpse rising saltwhite
from the undertow, bobbing
landward, a pace a pace a porpoise.
There he is. Hook it quick. Sunk 6. Detect the ironic and parodic
though he be beneath the watery instantiations.
floor. We have him. Easy now. […]
God becomes man becomes
fish becomes barnacle goose
becomes featherbed mountain.
Dead breaths I living breathe, tread
dead dust, devour a urinous offal 7. Consider the shifts from the
from all dead. Hauled stark over the ‘he’ to the ‘I’ and relate them to
gunwale he breathes upward the narrative technique.
stench of his green grave, his
leprous nosehole snoring in the sun.
A seachange his brown eyes
saltblue. Seadeath, mildest of all
deaths known to man. Old Father
Ocean. Prix de Paris: beware of 8. See how the category of time is
imitations. Just you give it a fair trial. handled and to what purpose.
We enjoyed ourselves immensely.
Come. I thirst. Clouding over.
No black clouds anywhere, are
there? Thunderstorm. Albright he
falls, proud lightning of the intellect,
Lucifer, dico, qui nescit occasum. 9. Trace Joyce-the-man and
No. My cockle hat and staff and his Joyce-the artist in the web of
my sandal shoon. Where? To textual design.
evening lands. Evening will find
itself.
He took the kilt of his ashplant,
lunging with it softly, dallying still.
Yes, evening will find itself in me,
without me. All days make their end. 10. Find a plausible explanation
By the way next when is it? Tuesday for the writer’s experimentally
will be the longest day. Of all the dealing with form, while
glad new year, mother, the rum tum traditionally handling content.
tiddledy tum. Lawn Tennyson,
gentleman poet. Già.
(adapted from James Joyce,
Ulysses, 1989: 118)
Chapter 3 - TESTS
3.6. Test Six
“What nonsense, mother – 1. Discuss he text in terms of the

you know I don‟t love her – I – I normality/abnormality of the
tell you I don‟t love her – she situation foregrounded. Underline
doesn‟t even walk with my arm, the literary connotations.
because I don‟t want her to.”
“Then why do you fly to her so
often!”
“I do like to talk to her – I
never said I didn‟t. But I don‟t love
her.”
“Is there nobody else to talk
to?” 2. Trace the inner message of the
“Not about the things we talk excerpt in connection with
of. There‟s lots of things that you‟re Lawrence’s philosophy of life and
not interested in, that –” art.
“What things?”
Mrs. Morel was so intense that
Paul began to pant.
“Why – painting – and books.
You don‟t care about Herbert
Spencer.”
“No,” was the sad reply. “And
you won‟t at my age.” 3. Follow the zigzagging from
“Well, but I do now – and words and gestures to feelings, and
Miriam does.” […] He knitted his develop on their interrelatedness.
brows with pain.
“You‟re old, mother, and we‟re
young.”
He only meant that the
interests of her age were not the
interests of his. But he realized the
moment he had spoken that he had
said the wrong thing. 4. Consider the representations of
“Yes, I know it well – I am old. the self as forwarded by the text.
And therefore I may stand aside; I
have nothing more to do with you.
You only want me to wait on you –
the rest is for Miriam.”
He could not bear it.
Instinctively he realized that he was
life to her. And, after all, she was
the chief thing to him, the only 5. What does the realism of the
supreme thing. text consist in?
“You know it isn‟t, mother, you
know it isn‟t.”
She was moved to pity by his
cry.
“It looks a great deal like it,”
she said, half putting aside her
Chapter 3 - TESTS
despair.
“No, mother, I really don‟t love 6. Look into narrative practice and
her. I talk to her, but I want to come technique between tradition and
home to you.” innovation.
He had taken off his collar and
tie, and rose, barethroated, to go to
bed. As he stooped to kiss his
mother, she threw her arms round
his neck, hid her face on his
shoulder, and cried, in a
whimpering voice, so unlike her 7. Analyse characters: men and
own that he writhed in agony: women, and the power structures
“I can‟t bear it. I could let associated with each.
another woman – but not her.
She‟d leave me no room, not a bit
of room –”
And immediately he hated
Miriam bitterly.
“And I‟ve never – you know –
Paul – I‟ve never had a husband – 8. Use your knowledge of the
not really –” writer’s life to pinpoint some of his
He stroked his mother‟s hair, sources of inspiration.
and his mouth was on her throat.
“And she exults so in taking
you from me – she‟s not like
ordinary girls.”
“Well, I don‟t love her,
mother,” he murmured, bowing his
head and hiding his eyes on her 9. How is the battle between the
shoulder in misery. His mother wide range of human feelings and
kissed him a long, fervent kiss. reason/judgement/knowledge
“My boy!” she said, in a voice brought forth by the excerpt?
trembling with passionate love.
Without knowing, he gently
stroke her face.
“There,” said his mother, “now
go to bed. You‟ll be so tired in the
morning.” As she was speaking she
heard her husband coming. 10. What other similarly shocking
“There‟s your father – now go.” scenes have made Lawrence’s
Suddenly she looked at him almost fame?
as if in fear. “Perhaps I‟m selfish. If
you want her, take her, my boy.”
(adapted from David Herbert

Lawrence, Sons and Lovers,
1993: 228-229)

REFERENCES
References
Conrad, Joseph (1999) Heart of Darkness and Other Stories, London:

Wordsworth Classics
Forster, Edward Morgan (1989) A Passage to India, London: Penguin
Books
James, Henry (1985) Novels 1881-1886: Washington Square, the Portrait
of a Lady, the Bostonians, New York: The Library of America
Joyce, James (1989) Ulysses, England: Oxford University Press
Lawrence, David Herbert (1993) Sons and Lovers, London: Wordsworth
Classics
Woolf, Virginia (1996) Mrs. Dalloway, London: Penguin Books
Bradbury, Malcolm; James Mcfarlane (eds) (1976) Modernism, London:
Penguin Books
Hewitt, Douglas (1994) English Fiction of the Early Modern Period 1890-
1940, London and New York: Longman
Lodge, David (1983) The Modes of Modern Writing, Illinois: Whitehall
Company Wheeling
Pritchard, David (2001) James Joyce, Scotland: Geddes & Grosset
Stevenson, Randall (1992) Modernist Fiction, Hertfordshire: Harvester
Wheatsheaf
Woolf, Virginia (1977) Books and Portraits, London: Triad/Panther Books

GLOSSARY OF LITERARY TERMS
Glossary of Literary Terms
allegory form of narrative containing meanings different from

or additional to those made explicit on the literal
surface
allusion reference made in a literary work to something that
lies outside it
analepsis flashback in narrative; reference to its past
archetype theme, image, pattern, character, interest, situations,
plot and personality recurrent in literature; myth
aside also known as „disclamer‟; text which is added to the
fictional one proper and which comments on the
latter‟s form/content
atmosphere the mood of a written work; it may be moral,
sensational, emotional or intellectual
bildungsroman „formation novel‟; one which describes the
protagonist‟s development from early childhood to
maturity and old age
carnivalesque co-existence of multiple points of view available to
plural interpretations; works which subvert the
literary culture of the ruling classes and undermine
their claim to moral monopoly
characterisation the way in which characters are created and
described within a narrative, with a view to
producing different reactions in the reader(s); there
are as many methods of characterisation as there
are ways of narrating
characters invented, imaginary people populating the universe
of fiction; access to them is enabled by means of
dialogue, action, description
collage the technique of gluing together otherwise disparate
elements; jumping from one topic to another by
means of fragmentary images
comic means of provoking sympathetic or derisive laughter
counternarrative narrative which disturbs grand narratives with a
political or manipulative function; innovative, anti-
canonical
cubism 20th century style of art, in which objects and people
are represented by geometric shapes
decadence the state of having low moral standards and being
more concerned with pleasure than with serious
matters
decentring in deconstruction, a term used to denote the
opposition to the centre (ideological, political,
cultural, linguistic)
defamiliarisation making strange; making the familiar seem totally
new, as if it were seen for the very first time
dénouement the final unfolding of a plot, satisfying or denying the
ON MODERNISM
reader‟s expectations from a narrative
description the creation or representation in words of objects,
people, patterns of behaviour or scenes
dialogism the expression of a variety of viewpoints, leaving the
reader with open questions
diction the choice of words in a literary text; the kind of
vocabulary used
diegesis narrative, telling; the elemental story level of a
narrative; derived are: the homodiegetic level (of
the story told in the first person by a character-
narrator); the heterodiegetic level (of the story told
in the third person by an authorial narrator); the
intradiegetic level (of events that are part of the
same story as the narrator‟s); the extradiegetic
level (of events that are part of a different story than
the narrator‟s)
digression a straying away from the main subject/idea; free
association
disclaimer also known as „aside‟; explanatory text running
counter reader expectation
discourse the „how‟ of a narrative (as opposed to the „what‟, or
story pattern); also „voice‟
ellipsis omission of essential words; as a figure of speech:
the condensation of maximum meaning into the
shortest form of words
éloignement spatial or temporal distancing (usually with a view to
looking back at once familiar details from a different
standpoint)
epiphany sudden meaning or insight carrying artistic potential
epistolary means of telling a story through letters of
participants or observers
existentialism philosophical trend which stresses the importance of
existence; takes the view that the universe is an
inexplicable, meaningless and dangerous theatre
where the responsibility of making choices
determines the nature of this existence and allows a
freedom which results in a state of anxiety (due to
endless possibilities)
expressionism European artistic movement meaning to show reality
as distorted by an emotional or abnormal state of
mind
fable short moralising tale in which animals act like human
beings
fantastic unreal happening demanding supernatural and
psychological explanation; creates a state of
suspended understanding in the reader
fantasy the most playful kind of imagining, separated from
any kind of contact with the real world; in literature: a
world which is parallel to the real one
fauvism a 20th century style of painting which uses pure
bright colours
focalisation perspective or viewpoint adopted as the lens

ON MODERNISM
through which particular events, descriptions or
characters are seen and reported
framing story the story that embeds other, successive stories by
means of mise-en-abîme
free indirect style a narrative technique which uses the third person to
refer back to a first person and juxtaposes direct and
reported speech
futurism early 20th century style of painting, music and
literature that expresses the violent, active qualities
of modern life
grand narratives logical, chronological narratives covering whole
lives, with metonymical characters and a moralising
tendency; based on the Western evolutionary ideal
of progress
grotesque deliberate distortion and ugliness intended to shock,
satirise or amuse
gynesis feminist critical orientation concerned with
constructions of women and womanhood
gynocritics feminist critical orientation concerned with the
characteristics of texts written by women
historiography the literary re-writing of history, where the past may
be „set right‟ or made to move in different directions
hybridity mixture, usually in a cultural acceptance
idiolect the individual language system of a certain person
(his/her pronunciation, choice of vocabulary, usage,
grammatical forms)
image word picture, description of some visible scene or
object; more generally, reference to objects and
qualities which appeal to the senses and feelings
imagery commonly, the figurative language in a literary work;
words referring to things that appeal to the senses
imagism modernistic movement in art and literature aiming at
a musical presentation without adornment
imitation concept which underlies theories of realism;
literature is seen as a mirror held up to life
immasculation becoming masculine, authoritative, imposing; in
feminist terms: violent, manipulative
implied reader imagined, intended reader; also known as „encoded
reader‟
impressionism 19th century style of painting which uses colour
instead of details of form to produce effects of light
or feeling
interior monologue means of narrating so as to convey in words the
process of consciousness
intertextuality the many and various kinds of relationships that
exist between texts; from this perspective, literature
is seen as a self-referential system or structure
intratext text presupposed by a self-referential text
irony saying one thing and meaning another; usually
involving understatement, concealment or allusion
juxtaposition deliberate multi-layering of narrative to produce
special effects

ON MODERNISM
kűnstlerroman novel which focuses on the spiritual or artistic
maturation of its protagonist
leitmotif a recurrent motif (type of character, theme, image)
logocentrism the centrality (authority) of the word/ language
magic realism fiction which mixes and disrupts ordinary, everyday
realism with strange, impossible and miraculous
episodes and powers
metafiction fiction about fiction; elitist, narcissistic, circular or
repetitive; associated with „the literature of
exhaustion‟
mimesis imitation, reflection, mirroring of life/reality
mirrors reflectors; functional characters used to reflect on
the protagonist
montage art form in which a piece of writing is made from
parts belonging to different pieces
Movement (the) a school of poetry associated with the fifties, whose
representatives reasserted traditional values
favouring a so-called „no-nonsense‟ tone
myth stories usually concerning gods or superhumans; a
system of myths voicing the religious or
metaphysical beliefs of a society; nowadays, that
which culturally defines humanity as a whole
narrated character/event that the narrative centres around
narratee implied, imagined figure in the text to whom a
narrative is told
narrative story in which a selection of incidents is made so as
to suggest some relationship between them; their
sequencing is also significant for the point intended
narrative technique method, skill of narrating (telling); manipulation of
narrators and points of view
narratology „science‟ which studies the „grammar‟ of narratives;
analysis, categorisation and theory of narratives
narrator he/she who tells the story; a narrator may be of an
author type or of a character type (usually
associated with a third or a first person narrative
respectively); first person narrators may be:
unreliable (a character whose opinions cannot be
taken for granted since they are subjective) or
autobiographical (supposedly objective); third
person narrators may be: intrusive (commenting
upon their stories) or impersonal (somehow
detaching themselves from the stories they tell);
omniscient (playing the God-game and pretending
to know everything about everybody) or limited
(presupposing a restricted, „human‟ point of view)
naturalism an extension of realism; it claims scientific accuracy
nouveau roman French avant-garde, the experimental anti-novel of
the 50s and 60s
novel long fiction which concentrates on character and
incident and usually contains a plot; it covers a wide
range of styles and manners, subject matter and
technique

ON MODERNISM
omniscience God-like knowledge of characters, actions,
situations, thoughts
paradox statement which is apparently self-contradictory; one
that seems in conflict with reason and common
sense
parody imitation of a particular work intended to ridicule its
specific features
petits histoires subjective stories about individual experiences
glimpsed at and allowed to connote
plot the pattern of relationships existing between events;
the „how‟ or „why‟ of a narrative; „discourse‟ in
narratology
point of view the way in which the material and the audiences are
approached by a narrator
polyphony the co-existence of different voices (types of
discourse) and points of view in a literary work
prolepsis rhetorical term which refers to the anticipation of
future events in a narrative; flashforward
psychological style of writing in which the inner lives of the
realism characters, their ideas, feelings, mental and spiritual
development are realistically mirrored
pun „play upon words‟; one and the same word may lead
to opposing meanings
realism the literary trend associated with the increasing
relevance of scientific investigation during the later
half of the nineteenth century; seeking to show up
the false hopes and fanciful aspirations of
characters; mimetic, usually in opposition with fiction
which describes life as full of thrilling adventure and
fulfilled aspirations
repetition recurrent use intended to emphasize an idea or to
create a sense of pattern
romantic new interest in nature, corresponding with the
investigation of the self; exploring the complicated
relationships between things, feelings and ideas
setting the temporally-marked place against which
characters are presented and which determines
them to a certain extent
short story small prose fiction concentrating on few characters,
having a simple plot and numerous descriptions; it
provides a swift dénouement (ending)
stereotype standard, fixed idea or mental impression; a cliché,
an ordinary perception made dull by constant
repetition
story the logical and chronological sequencing of events
told; the „what‟ of a narrative
stream of the flow of human thought, usually rendered by
consciousness means of free indirect style and interior monologue
style the characteristic manner in which writers express
themselves or the particular manner of an individual
work; specific subject matter, vocabulary, imagery,
diction etc.

ON MODERNISM
suggestion ideas and meanings of language that are beyond the
bare literal significance
surrealism 20th century artistic trend which connects unrelated
images and objects in a strange way
syllepsis a simultaneous presentation of events that pertain to
the past, present and future of a narrative; a figure of
speech, also known as zeugma, in which words or
phrases with very different meanings are yoked
together
symbol something which represents something else (usually
an idea or abstraction) by means of analogy or
association
theme abstract subject of a work; central idea (explicit or
implicit)
time in literature, it may be objective and/or subjective,
the time of the clocks and/or the time of the mind
tone manner or mood; attitude adopted by the „speaker‟
in a literary work
trope figurative language; words or phrases not used in
their literal sense; sometimes distinguished from
figures of speech, whose departure from ordinary
speech is a matter of order or rhetorical effect, rather
than of meaning
Victorian having been produced during the reign of Queen
Victoria (1832-1901); usually realistic
voice authorial persona; speech
vorticism modernist movement in art and literature redefining
the image in more dynamic terms; a continuation of
imagism
witness character who does not participate in the events
told; secret sharer

ON MODERNISM

Modernism and The Novel in English

Transféré par

Informations du document

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Modernism and The Novel in English

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Contents

Chapter 2 – Representative Names and Titles 13

2.1. Henry James 13

3.1. Test One 32

Glossary of Literary Terms 44

MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH 3

The course is designed so as to allow form to support content and invite at

Its main objectives are:

It comprises an informative section (Chapters1-2: “Modernism” and

MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH 5

Modernism is the early twentieth century orientation associated with

MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH 7

MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH 8

MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH 9

1.2. Early Modernism (James, Forster, Conrad)

1.3. Experimentalism (Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence)

The experimental novel in English developed during the inter-bellum

MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH 11

MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH 12

Chapter 2 – Representative Names and Titles

2.1. Henry James

 born in New York, in 1843

Henry James‟s career as a novelist began and ended with works

MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH 13

MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH 14

The Portrait of a Lady

One of the novels belonging to Henry James‟s early period of creation,

2.2. Edward Morgan Forster

 born in London, in 1879

Edward Morgan Forster‟s literary work primarily belongs to the realist

MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH 16

MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH 17

Forster‟s mature work, A Passage to India, is neatly structured into

2.3. Joseph Conrad

 born in Poland, in 1857

Conrad too may be looked upon as a writer very much indebted to

MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH 19

MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH 20

2.4. Virginia Woolf

 born in London, in 1882

MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH 22

MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH 23

A novel which chronologically covers a twenty-four hour span, Mrs.

MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH 24

2.5. James Joyce

 born in Rathgar, Dublin, in 1982

MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH 26

A novel emblematic for the twentieth century, Ulysses anchors the

MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH 27

2.6. David Herbert Lawrence

 born at Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, in 1885

David Herbert Lawrence is the experimentalist who treats the inner

MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH 28

MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH 29

Sons and Lovers

This overtly autobiographical novel about the destruction of the

MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH 31

3.1. Test One

“Dear me, who is that strange 1. Consider the way in which, on

(adapted from Henry James, The

10. How may the fiction/reality

MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH 33

3.2. Test Two