E070 The Novel

The Novel
BA English
J. Cohen, J. Desmarais, B. Moore-Gilbert

J. T. Parnell
2002 0033E070
This guide was prepared for the University of London by:
J. Cohen, Phd, Lecturer in English, Goldsmiths College, University of London
J. Desmarais, MA, PhD, Lecturer in English and Art History, Departments of
English, and Historical and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of
London
B. Moore-Gilbert, MA, DPhil, Reader in English, Goldsmiths College, University
of London
J.T. Parnell, PhD, Lecturer in English, Goldsmiths College, University of London.
This is one of a series of subject guides published by the University. We regret that
due to pressure of work the authors are unable to enter into any correspondence
relating to, or arising from, the guide. If you have any comments on this subject
guide, favourable or unfavourable, please use the form at the back of this guide.
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Correction BA and Diploma in English
033E070 The Novel
December 2008: First correction
Students should note the following examiners’ changes for the

2009 examinations onwards:
033E070 The novel

There is one change to the demands of Section B:
‘Answers in this section should refer to AT LEAST TWO different
authors. You may NOT write about an author or text that you have
discussed in Section A.’
Thus, students preparing for the examination in this unit should
prepare at least six texts by three different authors.
Contents
Contents
Introduction ..............................................................................................................1
Subject objectives ......................................................................................................1
Content ......................................................................................................................1
Suggested primary reading ........................................................................................2
Suggested topics ........................................................................................................3
Advice on reading ......................................................................................................3
Secondary reading ......................................................................................................4
Suggested study syllabus ..........................................................................................6
Study questions and recommended secondary reading for suggested
study topics ................................................................................................................7
The origins and rise of the novel (weeks 1–2) ..........................................................7
Genre and sub-genre ..................................................................................................8
Narrative technique and theory: character ................................................................9
Narrative voice and perspective ................................................................................9
Narrative structure and chronology ........................................................................10
Narrative theory ......................................................................................................10
Realism and mimesis ..............................................................................................11
Self-conscious fiction ..............................................................................................11
Modernist and postmodernist fiction ......................................................................11
Gender ......................................................................................................................12
The role of the reader ..............................................................................................13
Using this subject guide ..........................................................................................13
Methods of assessment ............................................................................................14
Preparing for the examination ................................................................................14
Chapter 1: Section A author study: Jane Austen ....................................................17
Essential reading ......................................................................................................17
Recommended secondary reading on Austen ........................................................17
Introduction ..............................................................................................................18
The debate on Austen ..............................................................................................18
Austen and the novel ..............................................................................................19
Mansfield Park: the rhetoric of realism ..................................................................21
Persuasion: subjectivity and narrative voice ..........................................................23
Suggestions for further study ..................................................................................25
Learning outcomes ..................................................................................................25
Sample essay questions ..........................................................................................25
Chapter 2 Section A author study: Honoré de Balzac
(Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot) ..............................................................................27
Recommended secondary reading ..........................................................................27
Further reading ........................................................................................................28
Introduction ..............................................................................................................29
Background ..............................................................................................................29
The Human Comedy cycle ......................................................................................31
Realism ....................................................................................................................32
Characterisation ......................................................................................................33
Contrast ....................................................................................................................34
i
The Novel
Sensation, genre, mystery and melodrama ............................................................35

Themes ....................................................................................................................35
Narrative voice ........................................................................................................36
Language ..................................................................................................................37
Chapter 3: Section B topic study: modern Gothic ..................................................39
Introduction ..............................................................................................................40
The history of Gothic ..............................................................................................40
Gothic elements in Fowles and Murdoch ..............................................................41
The cultural politics of modern Gothic ..................................................................43
Gender issues ..........................................................................................................44
Class issues ..............................................................................................................46
Chapter 4: Section B topic study: post-modernism ................................................49
Introduction ..............................................................................................................51
Post-modernism: problems of definition ................................................................51
Describing post-modernism: Harvey and Jameson ................................................52
White Noise: the simulated culture of post-modernity ..........................................53
Prescribing post-modernism: Lyotard ....................................................................55
City of Glass: post-modernism and metafiction ....................................................56
Appendix ..................................................................................................................59
Sample examination paper ......................................................................................59
ii
Introduction
Introduction
This subject, The novel, is a Group B advanced unit. It will focus primarily on works
originally written in English but will also consider novels in translation. This subject
guide focuses on novels from the eighteenth century to the present, but you are
allowed to study and write on earlier material where relevant.
Subject objectives
This subject is designed to help you to gain an understanding of a form central to
English literature and literary studies more generally. The term ‘novel’ has been
loosely applied by writers and critics to a broad range of texts but, for the purposes of
this subject, the term will be restricted to fictional works, written in prose, of
sufficient length to be deemed ‘novels’. Some of this subject’s main objectives will be
to help you to:
• gain an understanding of the development of the novel as a form of literary
production from its beginnings to the present day and in relation to its social and
literary contexts
• explore how individual novelists employ specific literary techniques in order to
serve their particular narrative strategies
• compare how different authors have used the novel to address recurrent thematic
concerns and expanded the possibilities of the form in different ways
• study contemporary critical debates about the novel through an engagement with
secondary sources
• engage with the issues involved in canon formation.
It will be useful to keep these points in mind when you set about planning your own
course of study and when assessing your progress. (Self-assessment procedures are
discussed in the Handbook.)
Content
You can organise your course of study around particular authors and/or particular
topics of your choice but you should try to read a representative selection of novels
including eighteenth- and nineteenth-century realist novels, early twentieth-century
modernist novels and some post-modern fiction. You are also recommended to study
authors from across the British, American, European and non-Western traditions. The
following list is by no means exhaustive; it is a selection of important and influential
novels you may care to study. You may want to think about what this list, a ‘canon’ of
sorts, includes and what it leaves out. You should try to read at least some of the
novels from this list, but you should not feel limited by this selection. Bear in mind
that you will want to explore the novel both synchronically (i.e. as it exists at a given
moment without reference to its past) and diachronically (i.e. as it passed through
time). When studying the earlier history of the genre, the selection of texts will
inevitably be more limited to European novels.
1
The Novel
Suggested primary reading

(Dates in parentheses, unless otherwise stated, indicate year of publication.)
• François Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1534).

• Philip Sidney The Arcadia (1581).
• Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (1605–1615).
• John Bunyan The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678–1684).
• Aphra Behn Oroonoko, or the History of the Royal Slave (1688).
• Eliza Haywood Love in Excess (1719).
• Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe (1719) or Moll Flanders (1722).
• Henry Fielding Joseph Andrews (1742) or Tom Jones (1749).
• Samuel Richardson Pamela (1740) or Clarissa (1747–1748).
• Laurence Sterne The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–1767).
• Frances Burney Evelina (1778).
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) or Elective
Affinities (1809).
• Pierre Choderlos de Laclos Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782).
• Ann Radcliffe The Romance of the Forest (1791) or The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794).
• Maria Edgeworth Belinda (1801).
• *Jane Austen Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1818).
• Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (1847).
• Herman Melville Moby-Dick, or, The Whale (1851).
• Charles Dickens Hard Times (1854).
• Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary (1857) or The Sentimental Education (1869).
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment (1866).
• George Eliot Middlemarch (1871–1872).
• Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy Anna Karenina (1873–1877).
• Emile Zola Germinal (1885).
• *Honoré de Balzac Eugénie Grandet (1833-34) and Pere Goriot (1835).
• Henry James The Spoils of Poynton (1897).
• Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1902) or Nostromo (1904).
• *Marcel Proust Remembrance of Things Past (1913–1927).
• *Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage (1915-38).
• Rabindranath Tagore Home in the World (1916).
• Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence (1920).
• James Joyce Ulysses (1922).
• Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway (1925).
• Mikhail Bulgakov The Master and the Margarita (1928–1940, published
1966–1967).
• Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
• Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958).
• Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (1958) or Pale Fire (1962).
• Alain Robbe-Grillet In the Labyrinth (1959).
• Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook (1962).
• John Fowles The Collector (1963).
• Iris Murdoch The Unicorn (1963).
• Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49 (1966).
• Gabriel García Màrquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).
• Rita Mae Brown The Rubyfruit Jungle (1969).
• Italo Calvino If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979).
• Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981).
2
Introduction
• J.M. Coetzee The Life and Times of Michael K (1983).

• Angela Carter Nights at the Circus (1984).
• Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale (1985).
• Don Delillo, White Noise (1985).
• Paul Auster, City of Glass (1987).
• Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987).
• Robert Coover Pinocchio in Venice (1991).
*The two Austen, and the two Balzac, novels are listed as essential reading in Chapter
1 and 2.
*Proust’s and Dorothy Richardson’s novels unfold over several volumes. Although
you may want to read them in their entirety, you will gain a worthwhile sense of what
these writers are doing by reading the first volumes in the sequences (Proust’s
Swann’s Way and Richardson’s Pointed Roofs).
Suggested topics
Some topics which you may like to investigate are listed below. All of these are
relevant to the study of the novel – though you need not restrict yourself to them.
• The origins of the novel and its relationship with epic and romance.
• Critical accounts of the rise of the novel, including ideas about the relationship
between the early novel and a rapidly expanding print culture, and the relationship
between the novel and the rise of the bourgeoisie.
• Genre, including questions about the novel’s defining characteristics (and whether
such characteristics are historically specific), its generic hybridity and the sub -
genres into which it is divided.
• Narrative technique and narrative theory, including issues of narrative voice and
perspective, the concept of character and narrative structure.
• The development of realism and the concept of mimesis, including the dominance
of realism in the nineteenth century and its partial rejection in the twentieth
century.
• The alternative traditions of self-conscious fiction, and the development of the
novel in modernist, postmodernist and postcolonial fiction.
• The role of gender in the novel.
• The role of the reader.
Other topics, which are not listed here, might occur to you as you study.
Advice on reading
Because of the wide range of this subject, there is no one book or grouping of books
that can adequately cover the whole content. The books recommended below and
elsewhere in this study guide address most of the central concerns of the course, but
when you focus on particular authors and topics you may want to supplement this
reading with more specialised studies. Although you will be studying individual
novelists as well as topics, the primary concern of this subject is not with particular
novelists but with the novel as a genre. Thus the reading recommended below and in
the suggested reading organised by topic in Chapter 4 covers broad issues rather than
a core syllabus of novels or novelists. Furthermore, in order to allow you the freedom
to make your own selection of novels for close study, it is not practical to provide
booklists for each of the authors listed above. This means that for your study of
3
The Novel
authors and topics not listed above or discussed in this subject guide you will need to
compile your own reading lists, with the help of the Handbook and bearing the
following in mind.
Most libraries have computerised indexing which will cross-reference. So the entry
‘Cervantes’, for example, should produce lists of Cervantes’ writing, but also
biographies, critical readings, etc. The constraints of time make it impossible for you
to read very widely on particular authors, so if you want to find out more about, say,
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary you should look for a collection of essays or a single book
which aims to provide an introductory overview. Although they are not available for
all the novels that you might study, the kind of short, authoritative, critical discussions
of individual novels offered by a series like the Cambridge ‘Landmarks of World
Literature’ will generally provide sufficient information on given texts. If you want to
pursue your reading further, the bibliographies in such books are a good starting
place.
You will know from your work on the foundation units that the nature of English
studies has changed radically over the last 20 years. Bear this in mind. If all the
criticism that you read on, say, George Eliot was written in the 1950s you may have a
limited idea of the range of critical responses to this writer. At the same time, do not
assume that criticism from an earlier date is necessarily redundant.
Secondary reading
Essential texts
Hawthorn, Jeremy Studying the Novel, an Introduction. (London and New York:
Arnold, 1997) third edition [ISBN 0-340- 69220-0 (pbk)]. A clear, if basic,
introduction to many of the key issues and topics.
Hoffman, Michael J. and Patrick D. Murphy (eds) Essentials of the Theory of Fiction.
(London: Leicester University Press, 1996) second edition [ISBN 0-7185-0119-5
(hbk); 0-7185-0120-9 (pbk)]. A very useful collection of essays by some of the
major commentators on questions of narrative theory.
Booth, Wayne C. (1983) The Rhetoric of Fiction. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991)
second edition [ISBN 0-14-013736-X (pbk)]. A highly influential and admirably
clear study of the ‘rhetoric’ of a wide range of American and European novels.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith (1983) Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. (London
and New York: Routledge, 1989) [ISBN 0-415-04294-1 (pbk)]. An excellent
introduction to the theory of narratology using a wide range of international texts.
Other recommended books
Alter, Robert Partial Magic: The Novel as Self-Conscious Genre. (Berkeley, London:
University of California Press, 1975) [ISBN 0-520-02755-8]. A fluent study of
the ‘tradition’ of self-conscious novelists who question and parody dominant
novel-types.
*Auerbach, Erich Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature.
Translated by W. Trask. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953)
[ISBN 0-691-01269-5 (pbk)]. The author traces the gradual raising of low-life
mimesis to the level of high art and offers a close analysis of passages.
*Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination, Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin.
Edited by M. Holquist. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982)
[ISBN 0-292-71534-X].
Barthes, Roland (1967) Writing Degree Zero. Translated by Annette Lavers and Colin
Smith. (London: Cape, 1984) [ISBN 0-224-02267-9]. A brief but elegant
statement of a post-modernist rejection of realism in France.
4
Introduction
Barthes, Roland (1973) S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990)
[ISBN 0631176071].
Bradbury, Malcolm (ed.) The Novel Today. (Glasgow: Fontana, 1990) revised edition
[ISBN 0-00-686183-0].
*Brink, André The Novel: Language and Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino.
(Houndmills: Macmillan, 1998) [ISBN 0-333- 68408-7 (hbk); 0-333-68409-5 (pbk)]
Brooks, Peter Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard UP, 1984) [ISBN 0674748921 (pbk)].
Couturier, Maurice Textual Communication: A Print-based Theory of the Novel.
(London and New York: Routledge, 1991) [ISBN 0-415-03920-7]. A
sophisticated and informative text which explores the impact of the environment,
the market and the law on fiction from a materialist viewpoint.
Eco, Umberto The Role of the Reader. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1979). (London: Hutchinson, 1981) [ISBN 025320318X (pbk)]. Reader response
theory which argues that some texts are ‘open’ and others are ‘closed’.
Forster, E.M. (1927) Aspects of the Novel. Edited by Oliver Stallybrass
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990) [ISBN 0-140-18398-1 (pbk)]. Of historical
interest for its influential and much debated account of ‘rounded’ and ‘flat’
characters.
Genette, Gérard Narrative Discourse, an Essay in Method. Translated by J. E. Lewin.
(Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press,1980) [ISBN 0-801-49259-9 (pbk)].
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar The Madwoman in the Attic, the Woman Writer
and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1979) [ISBN 0-300-08458-7 (pbk)].
*Hunter, J. Paul Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century Fiction.
(New York and London: Norton and Co., 1990) [ISBN 0-393-30861-8 (pbk)].
*Iser, Wolfgang The Implied Reader, Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction
from Bunyan to Beckett. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1974) [ISBN 0-8018-2150-9 (pbk)]. Argues that the reader’s experience of
reading is at the centre of the reading process.
James, Henry The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism. Edited by Roger Gard
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987) [ISBN 0140432701 (pbk)].
Jameson, Fredric The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.
(Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press and Routledge, 1981 and
1989) [ISBN 0-415-04514-2 (pbk)]. Argues for the centrality and inevitability of
political interpretations of literary texts. Especially good on Conrad.
Kermode, Frank The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative.
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979) [ISBN 0674345355].
Kettle, Arnold (ed.) The Nineteenth Century Novel: Critical Essays and Documents.
(London: Heinemann in association with Open University Press, 1981) revised
edition [ISBN 0-335-10181-X].
Levin, Harry The Gates of Horn, a Study of Five French Realists: Stendhal, Balzac,
Flaubert, Zola and Proust. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963)
[ISBN 0-19-500727-1]. A survey of nineteenth-century realist novelists in France.
Lodge, David The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of
Modern Literature. (London: Edward Arnold, 1977) [ISBN 0-7131-6258-9 (pbk)].
Lodge, David After Bakhtin: Essays on fiction and criticism. (London and New York:
Routledge, 1990) [ISBN 0-415-05037-5 (hbk); 0-415-05038-3 (pbk)].
*Lodge, David The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts.
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992) [ISBN 0-140-17492-3 (pbk)]. Originated as a
journalistic enterprise, but contains surprisingly useful thumbnail definitions of
fictional topoi with illustrative examples.
5
The Novel
Lukács, Georg (1955) The Historical Novel. Translated by Hannah and Stanley
Mitchell. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) [ISBN 0-140-55081-X (pbk)].
Lukács, Georg (1920) The Theory of the Novel, a Historico–Philosophic Essay on the
Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock. (London: Merlin,
1978) [ISBN 0-85036-236-9 (pbk)].
McHale, Brian Postmodernist Fiction. (London: Routledge, 1989)
[ISBN 0-415-04513-4].
McKeon, Michael The Origins of the English Novel 1660–1740. (Baltimore, London:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) [ISBN 0-8018-3746-4 (pbk].
Phelps, Gilbert A Short Guide to the World Novel, the Myth to Modernism. (London:
Routledge, 1988) [ISBN 0-415-00765-8]. An extensively researched, non-
Eurocentric study of the development of the novel in world culture.
Scholes, Robert and Robert Kellogg The Nature of Narrative. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1966) [ISBN 0195007735 (pbk)].
Showalter, Elaine (1977) A Literature of Their Own, British Women Novelists from
Brontë to Lessing. (London: Virago, 1984) [ISBN 0-86068-285-4 (pbk)].
Spencer, Jane The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen.
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) [ISBN 0-631-13915-X (hbk); 0-631-13916-8 (pbk)].
Stern, Joseph Peter On Realism. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973)
[ISBN 0-7100-7379].
Stevenson, Randall Modernist Fiction: An Introduction. (London: Prentice Hall,
1997) revised edition [ISBN 013837659X (pbk)].
Toolan, Michael, Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction. (London: Routledge,
1988) [ISBN 0415008697 (pbk)].
*Watt, Ian (1957) The Rise of The Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding.
(London: Pimlico, 2000) [ISBN 0712664270 (pbk)]. A highly influential study of
the generic and sociological influences which gave rise to the novel.
Waugh, Patricia Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction
(London: Routledge, 1984) [ISBN 0415030064 (pbk)].
* Highly recommended
Suggested study syllabus

Here is a sample 20-week syllabus to give you an idea of how you could structure
your own syllabus for this subject.
Weeks 1–2: Background reading on theories of the novel and debates about its
origins (i.e. books like Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination
and Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel).
Weeks 3–4: Author study: Cervantes’ Don Quixote and some secondary material.
Week 5: Topic study: the genesis of the novel as a form (suggested text: Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe).
Week 6: Topic study: the epistolary novel (suggested text: Laclos’ Les Liaisons
Dangereuses or Burney’s Evelina).
Weeks 7–8: Author study: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Persuasion.
Weeks 9–10: Author study: Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot.
Week 11: Topic study: varieties of realism (secondary reading on realism and the
novel).
Week 12: Topic study: narrative voice and perspective (suggested text James’ The
Spoils of Poynton and some secondary material).
6
Introduction
Weeks 13–14: Topic study: modernism and the novel (suggested text — Woolf’s Mrs
Dalloway).
Week 15: Author study: Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and some secondary
material.
Weeks 16–17: Topic study: modern Gothic (suggested texts – Fowles’ The Collector
and Murdoch’s The Unicorn).
Week 18: Topic study: magic realism (suggested text – Màrquez’s One Hundred
Years of Solitude).
Weeks 19–20: Topic study: Post-modernism and the novel (suggested text –
Delillo’s White Noise).
You will notice that some of the novels in this subject are very long, so you may need
more than one week just to read them. Adjust your schedule accordingly.
Study questions and recommended secondary

reading for suggested study topics
Because the focus of this subject is on broad questions about the novel as a genre and
in order to allow you the freedom to select which novels to study, the essay/study
questions and recommended reading below relate to topics rather than individual texts.
These topics are not the only ones that you might wish to investigate further, but they
will help you to gain a fuller sense of the concerns of this subject. Although the
questions below are framed as essay questions of the kind you are likely to encounter
in the examination for this subject, you can use them as a focus for your studies on a
given topic even if you are not intending to write on it. As a guide, we have generally
specified whether your responses should cover one or more writers, but you are free to
ignore this advice and adapt questions to suit the novelists and novels you have chosen
to work on. Bear in mind, however, that broad questions about the genre are often most
successfully addressed with reference to two or three novels by different writers.
If you are working on a topic not covered in this subject guide, you may want to
devise your own questions in order to give focus to your studies. One way of doing
this is to choose a brief statement of a particular commentator’s thesis and use this as
a means of structuring your response. Remember that a bold or contentious claim is
more likely to provoke you into thought and a productive counter argument than a
bland one.
1
The Iliad or The Odyssey are Unless given below, the full bibliographical details for books can be found in the
probably the most easily
accessible examples of epic recommended secondary reading in the Introduction to this study guide.
narrative.
The origins and rise of the novel (weeks 1–2)
Questions
1. ‘[In epic] it is memory, and not knowledge, that serves as the source and power
for the creative impulse. That is how it was, it is impossible to change it: the
tradition of the past is sacred. [...] The novel, by contrast, is determined by
experience, knowledge and practice (the future)’. (BAKHTIN) In the light of this
quotation, compare the presuppositions of epic with those of the early novel.1
7
The Novel
2. ‘Romances are generally composed of the constant Loves and invincible

Courages of Hero’s, Heroins, King’s and Queens [....] where lofty Language,
miraculous Contingencies and impossible performances, elevate and surprize the
Reader [....] Novels are of a more familiar nature; Come near us [... and] delight
us with Accidents and odd Events, but not such as are wholly unusual or
unpresidented’. (CONGREVE, Preface to Incognita, 1692) To what extent is
2
This question would offer a Congreve’s distinction between romances and novels persuasive?2
productive way into a discussion
of Don Quixote and/or a 3. Write a critical account of Ian Watt’s thesis about the rise of the novel. You
comparison between a ‘romance’
like Sidney’s Arcadia and an should pay particular attention to Watt’s hypothesis about the relationship
early ‘novel’ such as Defoe’s between the rise of the middle class and the rise of the novel, and the assumption
Moll Flanders or Haywood’s
Love in Excess. that ‘formal realism’ is the defining feature of the new genre.
4. ‘[No] single word or phrase distinguishes the novel from romance or anything
else, and to settle for “realism” or “individualism” or “character” as the defining
characteristic diminishes the very idea of the novel and trivializes the conception
of a literary species.’ (HUNTER) Discuss with reference to critical debates about
the origins of the genre and at least two early novels.
Suggested reading
(See the main booklist at the head of this introduction for publication details.)
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. ‘Epic and Novel’ in Hoffman and Murphy (eds) Essentials of
the Theory of Fiction. Chapter 3.
Hunter, J. Paul Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century Fiction.
McKeon, Michael The Origins of the English Novel 1660-1740.
Scholes, Robert and Robert Kellogg The Nature of Narrative. Chapters 1–3.
Watt, Ian The Rise of the Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding.
Genre and sub-genre

Questions
1. ‘[The novel] is plasticity itself. It is a genre that is ever questing, ever examining
itself and subjecting its established forms to review.’ (BAKHTIN) Discuss with
reference to at least two novelists.
2. ‘We do the novel [...] a disservice if we fail to notice, once we have defined the
different world from romance that novels represent, how fully it engages the
unusual, the uncertain, and the unexplainable.’ (HUNTER) Discuss with reference
to at least two novelists.
3. ‘From the novel’s beginnings, intertextuality has been one of the few defining
characteristics of the genre.’ Discuss with reference to at least two novelists.
4. ‘One question the novel repeatedly asks is: How do you know?—answering basic
and simple human needs to know about the world, and to pursue that need in the
reading of novels.’ (HUNTER) Discuss with reference to at least two novelists.
5. ‘“Realism” is only one element in the novel’s history, other traditions such as
romance, gothic, fantasy and science fiction are equally important.’ Discuss with
reference to at least two novelists.
6. ‘Satire depends on simplification and is thus antithetical to the novel, which
excels in presenting complexity.’ Discuss with reference to at least two novelists.
7. ‘The history of the novel is a history of anti-novels.’ (FRANK KERMODE)
Discuss with reference to one or more novelists.
8
Introduction
8. ‘The novel is the only developing genre and therefore it reflects more deeply,
more essentially, more sensitively and rapidly, reality itself in the process of its
unfolding.’ (M. BAKHTIN) Discuss with reference to at least two novelists.
9. ‘Because the novel is such a flexible genre and because novels are written across
periods and cultures, it is meaningless to speak of a coherent “novel tradition”.’
Discuss with reference to at least two novelists.
10. With reference to at least two novelists you have studied, consider the view that
the concept of individualism underpins the novel form.
Suggested reading
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination, Four Essays.

Brink, André The Novel: Language and Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino.
Narrative technique and theory: character

Questions
1. ‘I believe that all novels [...] deal with character, and that it is to express
character—not to preach doctrines [...] that the form of the novel [...] has been
evolved.’ (VIRGINIA WOOLF) Discuss with reference to at least two novelists.
2. ‘We may divide characters into flat and round.’ (E.M. FORSTER) Consider the
validity of Forster’s distinction with reference to at least two novelists.
3. ‘Personality is what living beings have. “Character” on the other hand is what
people in novels have. The biggest ideological presupposition that novel readers
are encouraged to make is to think that characters in novel have personalities.’
Consider the means by which any one novelist encourages and/or discourages
such a view.
4. How valid is the distinction between novels of character and novels of action?
You should refer to at least two novelists.
Suggested reading
Forster E.M. ‘Flat and Round Characters’ in Hoffman and Murphy (eds) Essentials of
Gass, William H. ‘The Concept of Character in Fiction’ in Hoffman and Murphy
(eds) Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Chapter 13.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. Chapter 5.
Woolf, Virginia ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ in Hoffman and Murphy (eds)
Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Chapter 2.
Narrative voice and perspective

Questions
1. ‘The choice of point(s) of view from which the story is told is arguably the most
important single decision that the novelist has to make, for it fundamentally
affects the way readers will respond [...] to the fictional characters and their
actions.’ (DAVID LODGE) In the light of this claim, consider the handling of
point of view in the work of one or more novelists.
2. ‘No lyricism, no comments, the author’s personality absent.’ (FLAUBERT) With
what success does any one novelist achieve Flaubert’s dream of impersonality?
3. Consider the importance of narrators and/or narrative perspective in the work of
one or more novelists.
9
The Novel
4. ‘The art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter
to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself.’ (PERCY LUBBOCK)
Discuss with reference to the work of one or more novelists.
5. With reference to one or more novelists, consider how adequately the term
‘stream of consciousness’ describes their techniques of representing thought
processes.
Suggested reading
Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction.

Booth, Wayne C. ‘Distance and Point of View: An Essay in Clarification’ in Hoffman
and Murphy (eds) Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Chapter 9.
Leaska, Mitchell A. ‘The Concept of Point of View’ in Hoffman and Murphy (eds)
Lodge, David The Art of Fiction. Chapters 6, 9, 26, 27 and 33.
Lodge, David ‘Mimesis and Diegesis in Modern Fiction’ in Hoffman and Murphy
(eds) Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Chapter 24.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. Chapters 6–8.
Narrative structure and chronology

Questions
1. ‘The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth?—Because one did
survive the wreck.’ (MELVILLE, from the epilogue to Moby-Dick) Consider the
significance of beginnings and endings in the work of one novelist you have read.
2. ‘What puts our mind at rest is the simple sequence, the overwhelming variegation
of life now represented in [...] a unidimensional order.’ (ROBERT MUSIL) In the
light of this quotation, consider the significance of narrative structure in the work
of one or more novelists.
3. Consider the novelistic handling of time by at least two novelists.
Suggested reading
Brooks, Peter Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative.
Brooks, Peter, ‘Reading for the Plot’ in Hoffman and Murphy (eds) Essentials of the
Theory of Fiction. Chapter 23.
Genette, Gérard ‘Time and Narrative in A la recherche du temps perdue’ in Hoffman
and Murphy (eds) Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Chapter 14.
Kermode, Frank The Sense of an Ending .(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966)
[ISBN 0195007700].
Narrative theory
Questions
1. ‘Narrative theory helps us understand the mechanics of fiction, but is less helpful
when it comes to particular questions of interpretation.’ Discuss with reference to
2. With reference to one or more novelists, show how aspects of narrative theory
have enhanced your understanding of the genre.
Suggested reading
Gennette, Gérard Narrative Discourse, an Essay in Method.

Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics.
10
Introduction
Realism and mimesis

Questions
1. ‘The realist novel purports to offer a neutral and transparent representation of the
world, but is actually informed by particular assumptions about the “real” and
mediated by highly conventional rhetorical strategies.’ Discuss with reference to
2. ‘Recipe for the “realist” novel: invent a plot based on cause-and-effect; add well-
defined characters; assume throughout the world is susceptible to rational enquiry
and therefore knowable.’ Discuss with reference to one or more novelists.
3. ‘New problems appear and demand new methods. Reality changes; in order to
represent it, modes of representation must change.’ (BERTOLT BRECHT)
Discuss with reference to one or more novelists.
4. ‘Although realist fiction is often condemned for its bad faith and conventionality,
it is better understood as a pragmatic effort to render a complex world humanly
comprehensible.’ Discuss with reference to one novelist.
5. ‘The realism/experimentalism dichotomy is formalist. It construes realism as a set
of narrative techniques, and experimentalism as their subversion. This is
inadequate. Realism needs to be seen as a heterogeneous phenomenon.’ Discuss
with reference to one or more novelists.
Suggested reading
Auerbach, Erich Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature.

Barthes, Roland S/Z.
Barthes, Roland Writing Degree Zero.
Gasiorek, Andrzej Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After. (London and New York:
Edward Arnold, 1995) [ISBN 0340572159 (pbk)]. Especially Chapters 1 and 8
Levine, George ‘Realism Reconsidered’ in Hoffman and Murphy (eds) Essentials of
Lodge, David The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology
of Modern Writing.
Lodge, David ‘Middlemarch and the idea of the classic realist text’ in After Bakhtin:
Essays on Fiction and Criticism. Chapter 3.
Lukács, Georg ‘Marxist Aesthetics and Literary Realism’ in Hoffman and Murphy
(eds) Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Chapter 10
Self-conscious fiction
Questions
1. ‘Self-conscious fiction explicitly lays bare the conventions of realism; it does not
ignore or abandon them.’ In the light of this claim, consider the relationship
between ‘realism’ and ‘self-consciousness’ in the work of one or more novelists.
2. ‘We’ll not stop two moments, my dear Sir,—only, as we have got thro’ these five
volumes, (do, Sir, sit down upon a set – they are better than nothing) let us look back
upon the country we have pass’d through.’ (LAURENCE STERNE) Consider the
significance of self-conscious narration in the work of one or more novelists.
Suggested reading
Alter, Robert Partial Magic: The Novel as Self-Conscious Genre.

Waugh, Patricia Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction.
11
The Novel
Modernist and postmodernist fiction

Questions
1. ‘They’ve changed everything now [...] we used to think there was a beginning,
middle and an end.’ (THOMAS HARDY) In the light of this quotation, consider
how and to what end one or more novelists resist traditional narrative structure.
2. ‘Reality doesn’t exist, time doesn’t exist, personality doesn’t exist. God was the
omniscient author, but he died; now no one knows the plot.’ (RONALD
SUKENICK) Discuss with reference to one or more novelists.
3. ‘Modern fiction does not dispense with the idea of coherence, but rather looks for
new kinds of order.’ Discuss with reference to one or more novelists.
4. ‘My ideal postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates
either his twentieth-century modernist parents or his nineteenth-century pre-
modernist grandparents.’ (JOHN BARTH) To what extent does any one author
you have studied fulfill Barth’s ideal?
5. With reference to one or more novelist(s), consider the relationship between
innovation and tradition in either the ‘modernist’ or the ‘post-colonial’ or the
postmodern novel.
Suggested reading
Barth, John ‘The Literature of Replenishment’ in Hoffman and Murphy (eds)

Frank, Joseph ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature’ in Hoffman and Murphy (eds)
Lodge, David, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the
Typology of Modern Writing.
McHale, Brian Postmodernist Fiction.
Stevenson, Randall Modernist Fiction: An Introduction.
Gender
Questions
1. ‘The tradition of women novelists from the eighteenth century to the present day
offers a significant challenge to traditional accounts of the genre’s forms and
functions.’ Consider the view with reference to at least two novelists.
2. ‘There is no reason to think that the form of the epic or of the poetic play suit a
woman any more than the sentence suits her. But all the older forms of literature
had hardened and set by the time she became a writer. The novel alone was
young enough to be soft in her hands.’ (VIRGINIA WOOLF) In the light of this
quotation, consider at least two women novelists of the eighteenth and/or
nineteenth centuries.
Suggested reading
Hoffman and Murphy (eds) Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Chapters 27–29.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar The Madwoman in the Attic, the Woman Writer
and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.
Showalter, Elaine A Literature of Their Own, British Women Novelists from Brontë to
Lessing.
12
Introduction
The role of the reader

Questions
1. ‘The truest respect which you can pay the reader’s understanding, is to halve
matters amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as
yourself.’ (LAURENCE STERNE) In the light of this quotation, consider how
one or more novelists engage the reader in the process of interpretation.
2. ‘Your attention, as reader, is now completely concentrated on the woman [...] for
several pages you have been expecting this female shadow to take shape [...] and
is your expectation that drives the author toward her.’ (ITALO CALVINO) In the
light of this quotation, consider how one or more novelists exploit and/or
subvert the reader’s expectations.
Suggested reading
Eco, Umberto The Role of the Reader.

Iser, Wolfgang The Implied Reader, Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from
Bunyan to Beckett.
Using this subject guide

This subject guide is not an exhaustive study of, nor a comprehensive guide to, the
novel. Instead it is an elaborate series of signposts which suggests directions, topics,
themes, questions and critical approaches that could prove useful to you. It is up to
you to construct a course of study for yourself, using these pointers. Your schedule
should include the study of secondary literature – literary criticism and other material
you feel could provide a useful background to your study – as well as primary texts.
This subject guide, then, provides a general model – a guide to helpful critical
procedures and relevant material. However, you have to adapt this model to your own
needs and interests. Ideally, you should try to read as many of the novels listed above
as possible to give yourself a sense of the progression and scope of the novel as an
evolving form. More practically, we suggest you study at least two authors and at
least two topics in detail. This should be enough to allow you to answer three
questions confidently in the examination. Don’t forget that it is perfectly acceptable to
investigate issues which are not mentioned in this subject guide as long as they are of
relevance to the objectives described above.
This subject guide does not constitute the subject itself, but is an example of how you
could construct an appropriate course of study and devise appropriate ways of
studying the material you choose. It also indicates the range of material that is the
minimum amount necessary to face the exam with confidence. Simple regurgitation
in the examination of the illustrative material in this subject guide will be regarded as
plagiarism and heavily penalised. You must adapt such material in ways appropriate
to your own chosen syllabus of study. Examiners will always look unfavourably at
examinations composed of answers which draw solely on the illustrative material
provided in this subject guide.
Please note that there are other subject guides and introductions that might prove to be
of use to you, especially those which have sections on fictional prose writings. For
example, the Group A Moderns advanced unit subject guide contains a useful
introduction to Joyce. Look through the other subject guides and see if they cover
authors or topics that may be of interest to you. Do bear in mind, though, that this
subject guide is unique in two important respects:
13
The Novel
1. It focuses exclusively on one literary form, the novel, whereas other subject guides
have invited you to examine a period (e.g. Romanticism), a body of writings in
both prose and poetry (e.g. women’s writing or nineteenth-century American
literature), a single author (e.g. Shakespeare) or a general topic (e.g. modern
literary theory).
2. It includes novels in translation from other languages. Bear this in mind before
waxing lyrical on the language of foreign texts you choose to write on in the
examination. You may be celebrating the translator’s verbal dexterity, rather than
that of the original author.
Methods of assessment
You will be assessed by one three-hour examination. The examination paper will be in
two parts and you will be asked to answer three different questions, at least one from
each section.
Section A will comprise questions inviting you to compare and contrast novels by a
single author of your own choice. They will normally invite discussion with reference
to at least two novels. Section B will comprise questions on broader topics and
themes and invite discussion with reference to at least two novels by different
authors. You will be expected to demonstrate on this part of the examination some
familiarity with theories of narration and the novel, and a knowledge of the broader
contexts of fiction.
This subject guide is organised around the structure of the examination paper. It
contains examples of the kind of questions you can expect in the examination, in the
relevant chapters. There are two Section A single author studies and two Section B
topic studies as models for you to follow. There is also a sample examination paper
attached at the end of this guide. Please note the rubric which states:
‘Answer three questions, choosing at least one from each section. Candidates may
not discuss the same text more than once, in this examination or in any other
Advanced level unit examination.’
This means that you should not write on the same text in more than one answer –
although you may make passing reference to it.
Preparing for the examination

The sample examination paper included at the end of this subject guide gives you a
good idea of the range of questions you can expect. Remember, it is better to go for
depth rather than breadth in the examination.
An essay is not only an attempt to understand but also to convey understanding. It is this
specialised skill which the examination by essay seeks to test. Unfortunately, some
students’ essays fail to adequately convey understanding. This is rarely because a
student fails to grasp the concepts involved. Rather it is due to the failure of the essayist
to make a complete, well-supported case for whatever he or she is trying to say.
Preparing for the examination, then, starts with the study of the topic or topics that
interest you, followed by close reading and analysis of texts. Then you must begin to
organise the evidence that these analyses provide. Writing sample answers and essays
will not only prepare you for specific topics in the examination, but will also improve
your reading and analytical skills.
As you will have to choose from a limited number of essay titles for a subject with
very few constraints on what you can study, you must devote time to your essay
techniques. Before you launch into the essay, make sure you are properly prepared.
14
Introduction
Start by reading through the questions a few times before you begin, thinking about
which questions will enable you to display your knowledge and analytical skills to
the best extent. In so doing, you should ask yourself which themes/areas, etc. you
could appropriately and profitably use to answer these questions. When you have
decided on your essay questions, spend some time planning your answers, preferably
paragraph by paragraph. This should assist you in writing efficiently and effectively
without too many false starts, thus maximising your time.
The answer to a general examination question must be narrowed with ruthless
directness. Some questions will be so broad as to take in, conceivably, whole areas
and eras of literature. A successful essay must chart a very precise route through such
sprawling expanses of territory. You need to clearly define the terms within which you
intend to answer the particular questions you have chosen.
Start at the beginning. The introduction is essential. Here, you should tell the reader
how you have interpreted the question and what direction the essay will take. Just as
television news reports start with an announcement of the headlines, so your
introduction should contain a clear concise statement of the main argument the essay
will present. Look closely and ask yourself: will this main statement answer the
question? The essay, with the thesis statement as its centre, should not simply express
your opinion: it should make a considered and well-supported argument.
The main body of the essay should then follow on from what you say in your
introduction. Each paragraph must be directly related to developing what is implicit in
the main statement.
You should also use the question as a landmark, referring back to it regularly to make
sure you are following the right path and actually answering it.
Remember
• Don’t expect bald statements to stand on their own: support your claims with
examples (quotations for instance) or close reference to the text.
• At the same time, don’t pad the essay with unnecessary details or quotations.
The fine line between too much and too little detail can be drawn by considering
your audience: this is usually a tutor or examiner who is most interested in your
powers of analysis and your ability to express yourself in a clear, organised way.
• You should not include plot summary: you must assume that your readers are
very familiar with the work or works you are treating, even if such works are not
generally part of the literary canon.
• If you are using quotations do not expect them to stand on their own. Even a short
passage could be interpreted in more than one way. Quotations should be
contextualised (as well as analysed) if you are to maximise their contribution to
the essay.
• Don’t be too abstract, vague or speculative: make your argument clearly and
concisely.
The conclusion should be a concise summary of your main thesis, but it must not be
simply repetitive. The conclusion might also be an appropriate place to mention
information which did not directly follow from your main argument but which is
related and of interest to the reader.
15
The Novel
Notes
16
Chapter 1: Section A author study: Jane Austen
Chapter 1
Section A author study:

Jane Austen
Essential reading
Any complete texts of Mansfield Park and Persuasion will suffice, but the following
editions contain useful editorial material and retain Austen’s original volume and
chapter divisions. These divisions can be especially helpful in considering questions
of narrative structure.
Jane Austen Mansfield Park. Edited by James Kinsley with an introduction by

Marilyn Butler and notes by John Lucas. (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1990) [ISBN
0-19-282757-X].
Jane Austen Persuasion. Edited by John Davie with an introduction by Claude
Rawson. (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1990) [ISBN 0-19-282759-6].
Recommended secondary reading on Austen

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination, Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Edited
by M. Holquist. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982)
[ISBN 0-292-71534-X].
Bradbrook, Frank W. Jane Austen and her Predecessors. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1967) [ISBN 66-10245].
*Butler, Marilyn (1975) Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987) [ISBN 0-19-812968-8].
Butler, Marilyn Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its
Background 1760–1830. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981)
[ISBN 0198129688 (pbk)].
Davis, Lennard J. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. (Pennsylvania:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996; originally published 1983)
[ISBN 0812216105 (pbk)].
*Duckworth, Alistair M. The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s
Novels. (Baltimore, Md., and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994;
originally published 1971) [ISBN 0-8018-4972-1].
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer
and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1979) [ISBN 0-300-022867].
Hardy, Barbara A Reading of Jane Austen. (London: Athlone Press, 1975)
[ISBN 0-485-12032-1].
Honan, Park Jane Austen: Her Life. (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1987)
[ISBN 0-297-79717-2].
Hunter, J. Paul Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century Fiction.
(New York and London: Norton and Co., 1990) [ISBN 0-393-30861-8].
Johnson, Claudia L. Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel. (Chicago and
London: Chicago University Press, 1988) [ISBN 0-226-40139-1 (pbk)].
Kirkham, Margaret Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction. (London: The Athlone Press,
1997; originally published 1983) [ISBN 0485121298 (pbk)].
17
The Novel
Lodge, David ‘Composition, Distribution, Arrangement; Form and Structure in Jane

Austen’s Novels’ in Lodge, David After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism.
(London and New York: Routledge, 1990) [ISBN 0-415-05037-5].
Lodge, David The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts.
(London: Secker and Warburg, 1992) [ISBN 0-436-2567-1].
*Poovey, Mary The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the
Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. (Chicago and
London: Chicago University Press, 1984) [ISBN LC83-003664].
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) [ISBN 0-631-13915-X].
*Tanner, Tony Jane Austen. (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Macmillan, 1986)
[ISBN 0-333-32318-1 (pbk)].
Watt, Ian (1957) The Rise of The Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding.
(London: Pimlico, 2000) second edition [ISBN 07012664270 (pbk)].
Introduction
Although we will be looking principally at two novels, Mansfield Park (1814) and
Persuasion (1817), it would be equally possible to answer a question from Section A
of the examination paper by referring to two of Austen’s other three novels. Indeed,
much of the discussion here might be applied, with some necessary modifications, to
Austen’s entire canon.
The debate on Austen

While Austen’s reputation as an ‘important’ novelist has to some extent remained
stable from her own time to the present day, there has been, nevertheless, considerable
debate among readers as to the value and significance of her writing. If Lord David
Cecil could claim in 1935 that Austen’s ‘graceful unpretentious philosophy…is as
impressive as those of the most majestic novelists’, then a host of readers – including
an influential theorist and practitioner of the novel form like Henry James – has
equally complained of what are perceived to be Austen’s profound thematic
limitations and the ‘smallness’ of her imagined worlds. Two of Austen’s best-known
comments on fiction might be seen to endorse not only this pejorative view of her
range, but also a sense of a radically circumscribed vision too. Writing to a niece who
was herself dabbling with fiction, Austen expressed her satisfaction that Anna was
organising her characters and:
…getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life; 3 or 4 Families in
a Country Village is the very thing to work on.
Two years later, in 1816, Austen described her own work in somewhat self-
deprecating terms as:
…the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as
produces little effect after much labour.
Such comments can, of course, be interpreted in a number of ways, but it is worth
considering the negative assessment of Austen a little further. In terms of location,
it is true that the novels focus almost exclusively on small communities of gentry
in the home counties, with the larger urban world represented minimally by the odd
‘excursion’ to, say, Bath, Portsmouth or a roughly-sketched London. More
disturbing still for many readers is the apparent absence of any explicit or palpable
response to the massive social, political and cultural changes wrought by the
Industrial Revolution at home and the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars
across the Channel.
18
If we follow the logic of this approach, the charges are potentially seriously
damaging: living in one of the most turbulent periods in British and European history,
Austen writes about the passionless love affairs of the gentry. That ‘love interest’
informs Austen’s novels to the extent that all six of her complete novels replay the
basic narrative structure of romance – whereby the heroine wins and marries her man
after a series of complications – might indeed add fuel to the view that her concerns
are not only trivial but also escapist. Add to this the criticisms that the novels endorse
a class-obsessed snobbery, that they are politically reactionary and that Austen is an
apologist for the male ideology of female subordination, and we have yet more
reasons to question Austen’s reputation.
Debates about literary reputations are, of course, the very stuff of literary history, but
it is important to consider the specifics of the controversy over Austen. To what extent
is ‘narrowness’ a relative rather than an absolute term, and how might a similar charge
be levelled at any number of novelists? What might be the value and the significance
of Austen’s focus on such small and relatively homogeneous communities? Because
Austen consistently deploys romance motifs, and because her central concern is the
marriage of her heroines, does it necessarily follow that she eschews meaningful
engagement with the urgent issues of her day? To what extent are readers applying
anachronistic judgements when they condemn Austen’s broadly political
conservatism?
Although it might be argued that some elements of the debate outlined above amount
finally to matters of taste, it is noteworthy that a shift in the orientation of critical
approaches to Austen, which occurred in the 1970s, has changed both the nature of
the questions asked of the novels and, unsurprisingly, the kinds of answers given in
return. Thus, a new Austen has emerged as critics have sought to recover the historical
specificity of the novels’ concerns. Because we are primarily concerned with Austen
the novelist, the fuller details of the complex relationships between the novels and the
wars and revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are outside
the scope of this chapter. However, it is important to stress that Austen’s formal and
thematic concerns are intimately related to the ideological struggles and debates that
informed her times. Because the relationship between ‘history’ and novels is always a
complex one, there are some dangers in simply ‘placing’ Austen’s novels in relation
to, say, the French Revolution (1789), or the battles of Trafalgar (1805) and Waterloo
(1815). Nevertheless, you should try to familiarise yourself with some details of the
historical contexts that take place ‘around’ Austen’s writing, and the ‘war of ideas’ in
which her novels engage.
Before we move on to more particular questions of form, you might think about ways
in which Mansfield Park and Persuasion might be described as ‘political’. In what
ways does the larger world of ‘history’ make itself felt in the novels? How fruitful is
the suggestion that both novels are primarily concerned with the state of a nation felt
to be in transition if not crisis?
Austen and the novel

When Austen’s first-published novel, Sense and Sensibility, was printed in 1811, its
title page carried the subtitle ‘A Novel’. If this seems self-evident and redundant to
modern readers, then it is worth remembering that Austen was writing after a period
of at least a hundred years of experiment in prose fiction. During the early decades of
the eighteenth century, the generic boundaries between various kinds of prose fiction
and other sorts of writing were by no means concrete or widely agreed. That Austen
was able to categorise her novel with such confidence is an indication that, by the
beginning of the nineteenth century, tacit agreements had been reached enabling both
readers and writers to understand something reasonably specific by the term ‘novel’.
19
The Novel
Just when such agreements became general has been much debated, but we can get a
sense of their nature from the comments of Austen’s narrator in Northanger Abbey (a
novel published posthumously but first drafted around 1797/98). Referring
approvingly to particular novels by Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth, Austen’s
narrator defines these novels as:
…works in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most
thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the
liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen
language.
If this is a little vague, then the ensuing list of features of the periodical essay, against
which Austen seeks to define the ‘novel’, is, perhaps, more telling. Such essays are
condemned for offering ‘improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics
of conversation, which no longer concern any one living’.
What kind of novel is Austen defining here? What do you think she means by the
‘improbable’ and ‘unnatural’ and to what extent is it possible to reconcile such
exclusions with Austen’s own approach to plot and character?
What role do romance and fairy-tale motifs play in Austen’s fiction? If we take a
longer view of the novel, beginning with, say, Don Quixote and ending with late
twentieth-century fiction, how useful and comprehensive is Austen’s definition?
Austen’s ‘realism’
In his review of Emma in 1815, Walter Scott described Austen as an exemplary
practitioner of a new realism in prose fiction, a realism which he saw as peculiar to
the novel as it was developing in the early nineteenth century. Interestingly, the
‘realism’ that Scott finds in Austen is not a naïve and slavish mimeticism (i.e.
imitation), but rather a skilful presentation of characters from ‘ordinary walks of life’
presented ‘with such spirit and originality, that we never miss the excitation which
depends upon a narrative of uncommon events, arising from the consideration of
minds, manners and sentiments greatly above our own’. What Scott recognises here,
and what some modern critics have ignored in various condemnations of ‘realism’, is
that novelistic realism rarely, if ever, aspires to offer ‘reality’ in unmediated form.
Scott’s understanding of Austen’s realism is noteworthy in its suggestion of an
expectation of a general level of plausibility combined with an exemplary rather than
naturalistic approach to character.
While Scott’s critical tenets differ markedly from those of modern critics and readers,
his sense that Austen’s realism is a key characteristic of her fiction is one that has
been shared by many recent commentators. Retrospectively, Austen can be seen to
have drawn together some of the disparate realist strategies of eighteenth-century
fiction and to have developed them in hitherto unprecedented ways.
Familiar equally with Richardson’s refinements of the epistolary form and Fielding’s
use of the intrusive third-person narrative voice, Austen blends what has come to be
called ‘telling’ (direct commentary and judgement from the narrative ‘voice’) and
‘showing’ (the scenic, or dramatic, presentation of events in which the characters
speak and act without noticeable or intrusive authorial intervention) with great
subtlety. Although Austen’s own novels are no less didactic or conventional than those
of her eighteenth-century predecessors, they can often give the impression that they
are ‘slices of life’ rather than carefully contrived fictions.
It might be argued that this is largely a matter of reader response, since the reader
generally chooses whether or not to suspend his or her disbelief. Even so, part of
Austen’s impressive technical achievement was to create a sense of ‘reality’ by
20
deploying familiar narrative techniques in new ways. Similarly, Austen’s handling of a

narrative point of view and her ability to make apparently ordinary and mundane
events carry the broader burdens of her most serious concerns, make her as skilled a
novelist as any in a century that produced the great ‘classics’ of European realism.
In order to gain a sense of Austen’s relation to eighteenth-century novel traditions,

you may find it useful to consult Bradbrook (1967) and Spencer (1986). The latter is
particularly helpful because its demonstrates Austen’s inheritance from women
writers like Charlotte Lennox and Fanny Burney, and helps us to understand the
particular social pressures that helped to shape the tradition of didactic fiction for
women. If you are interested in debates about Austen’s feminism, then you might
also consult Poovey (1984) and/or Johnson (1988) and Kirkham (1983).
Mansfield Park: the rhetoric of realism

Mansfield Park is the first of what for many readers are Austen’s three most
successful and ‘mature’ novels (to be followed by Emma and Persuasion). Notions of
maturity and development in treatments of writers’ careers are not always reliable,
since they often presuppose a progression that is by no means a given and impose a
false sense of teleology. That said, however, it is reasonable to view Mansfield Park as
technically more accomplished than the novels first drafted a decade earlier (Sense
and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice). Austen is clearly as
much concerned in Mansfield Park with the meaning of certain key words (abstract
nouns in particular) as she is in her earlier novels. It might be argued, however, that
the novel’s greater success is partly a result of its ability to present abstractions in
concrete form. Thus the sometimes jarringly obvious antitheses of the kind found in
Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice have not altogether disappeared in
Mansfield Park but are handled with much greater subtlety.
Make a list of some key words/concepts that you consider important in Mansfield
Park. You might want to think about implied oppositions like that between innovation
and tradition, as well as explicit ones like the antithesis between propriety and
impropriety. How central and how intrusive are such oppositions in the novel?
Now reread Chapter VI of the first volume.
Chapter VI begins with the narrator setting the scene for a dinner-table discussion at
Mansfield Park. Thus we are told that Mr Rushworth has just returned from a friend’s
who has ‘had his grounds laid out by an improver’ and that Rushworth is now ‘eager
to be improving his own place in the same way’. Having prepared the ground with
succinct summary, Austen, typically, shows us the fuller significance of these details
by having Rushworth himself discuss ‘improvement’ in such a way as simultaneously
to further our sense of his rather vacuous mind and to suggest the broader resonance
of the topic of estate improvements. Whether or not we pick up the importance of the
reference to Repton (an influential and controversial theorist of landscape gardening
in the early nineteenth century) in this chapter, we are left in little doubt that
Rushworth wants to ‘improve’ out of a fidelity to fashion rather than from any more
considered impulse. To confirm the point, Austen has Rushworth repeat his
buzzwords in a comically absurd way:
It wants improvement, ma’am, beyond anything. I never saw a place that wanted so
much improvement in my life.
That Rushworth’s attitude towards Sotherton is coloured by a sense of bare statistics
rather than any character it might be felt to have is clear throughout the chapter, but
Austen seems keen to express much more than Rushworth’s mercenary views here.
21
The Novel
If Rushworth’s name suggests his precipitous and ill-considered judgement of ‘worth’,

then Fanny Price’s indicates, perhaps, not only her own merit, but also her ability to
see the real value of things. Tellingly, Fanny – whose true ‘price’ Edmund and the
other Bertrams come to learn in the course of the novel – is appalled by the prospect
of the avenue being destroyed at Sotherton. More important at this stage, however, is
Edmund’s description of Sotherton as a ‘house built in Elizabeth’s time’ that although
‘ill placed’ is nevertheless ‘unfavourable for improvement’. The reference to
‘Elizabeth’s time’ suggests not only antiquity, but also the period often viewed during
the eighteenth century as the ‘golden age’ in British history. More particularly,
Austen’s contemporaries would have been familiar with the language of
‘improvement’ from controversies about radical alterations to estates, and because
such vocabulary served as central metaphors in debates about British constitutional
change that followed in the wake of the French Revolution.
Once we have understood that Austen’s approach parallels Edmund Burke’s strategy,
in Reflections on the Revolution in France, of embodying traditional cultural values in
the actual fabric of estates, the fuller significance of the metonymic relationship
between the estates of Sotherton and Mansfield Park and traditional cultural values
becomes clear. In the light of continuing debates about whether revolution after the
French model or milder kinds of ‘improvement’ were needed in Britain, the
conclusion of Austen’s character Edmund is especially resonant:
…had I a place to new fashion, I should not put myself into the hands of an improver.
I would rather have an inferior degree of beauty, of my own choice, and acquired
progressively. I would rather abide by my own blunders than by his.
Bearing in mind that part of Sotherton’s function in the novel is symbolic, have
another look at Chapters VIII, IX and X. How critical are Mary Crawford’s remarks
on the proximity between the estate and the church at the end of Chapter VIII?
Consider how the disuse of the Sotherton chapel and the discussion of Edmund’s
desire to become a clergyman relate to the wider concerns of the novel. Think
carefully about what Austen is doing in Chapter X. To what extent does this chapter
prefigure particular relationships that develop later in the novel?
Chapter X, with its clearly symbolic handling of location, is to some extent an

extreme example of Austen’s technique in the novel. Nevertheless, the technique itself
should remind us of how Austen’s ‘realism’ works. The details of the imagined world
are on one level quite realistic – gardens and gates – and plausible, but at the same
time Austen is asking the reader to consider a complex of secondary, or non-literal,
meanings. It is in this sense, of course, that realism is not mimetic in any simple way,
but rather a carefully constructed, artful representation in which ideology and rhetoric
(the novelist seeks to persuade us of the value of particular ‘truths’ or ways of seeing)
are to the fore.
To what extent are Austen’s techniques typical of ‘realist’ novelists? Think about
some of the other novels you have read so far on this and other course units. Is this
the way, for example, that Great Expectations or Jane Eyre are organised? How
important is the rhetorical figure of metonymy to an understanding of realist fiction?
By reading the Sotherton episode carefully, we can discover what are some of the
central concerns of the novel. At this relatively early point in the narrative, Austen has
her characters debate questions of inherited values and how they might be preserved
or radically altered. Allowing for the fact that the novel also engages with other
fundamental issues – the education and marriage of Fanny Price, for example – these
are the key questions that inform Mansfield Park.
22
Bearing in mind that the physical structure of Mansfield Park stands as a metonym for
a traditional English culture, how would you set about interpreting the rest of the
novel? Look carefully at the preparation for the performance of Lovers’ Vows (the
debate begins seriously in Chapter XIII and the remainder of the first volume is
largely taken up with the theatricals) and the ramifications that follow the return of Sir
Thomas Bertram. How would you explain what might appear to be an excessive
reaction to a minor disruption?
What is the significance of the fact that it is Fanny (the poor cousin and ‘outsider’)
who defends and in some sense ‘saves’ Mansfield Park? How and with what degree of
success does the marriage between Edmund and Fanny resolve the novel’s most
urgent concerns?
Persuasion: subjectivity and narrative voice

Alistair Duckworth has suggested that Austen’s novels can be fruitfully viewed as
texts which look back to eighteenth-century Providential fictions and forward to the
fictions of doubt that flourish as the nineteenth century unfolds. Thus, on the one
hand, a novel like Mansfield Park seeks to affirm traditional Christian values in a way
that bespeaks some confidence, while on the other it charts the painful isolation of
Fanny Price. Fanny’s sense of self-worth is hard won in a milieu that proves
sometimes aggressively uncongenial to her values of quietness, stillness and self-
abnegation. For all that they finally adhere to the conventions of comedy, Austen’s
novels are consistently preoccupied with the lives of young women whose security
and happiness are radically threatened.
Partly because it is her last completed novel, and partly because it does signal some
formal and thematic departures from Austen’s previous novels, Persuasion has often
been placed at the nineteenth- rather than eighteenth-century end of the spectrum
touched upon above. Anne Elliot is that much more isolated than even Fanny Price.
Austen imbues Anne, like Fanny, with a moral integrity that is lacking in other
characters, and, like Fanny, Anne too is ignored and undervalued by those around her
for most of the narrative. What makes Anne’s situation particularly painful, however,
is that her one chance of happiness – in the form of marriage to Captain Wentworth –
seems to be behind her when the novel begins. If the threat of personal and cultural
atrophy is raised only to be expunged in Mansfield Park, then it seems to pervade the
autumnal atmosphere of Persuasion.
Consider some of the ways in which Persuasion might be seen as a more melancholy
and pessimistic novel than Mansfield Park. Does a sense of flux or stability finally
dominate the novel? Why does Austen use several locations rather than a central one
in the novel? To what extent does the novel suggest a loss of faith in the privileged
value in Mansfield Park?
For a number of complex reasons, many of them ideological, Austen’s novels

generally prefer objective ‘facts’ to subjective judgements. Thus, Catherine Morland,
Marianne Dashwood, Emma Woodhouse and even Elizabeth Bennet learn the dangers
of subjectivism in the course of the narratives in which they are central. Interestingly,
the situation is slightly different in Mansfield Park and Persuasion. In both novels, the
heroines are already exemplary insofar as they think of others ahead of self and tend
to judge by external, objective standards rather than subjectively. However, by
choosing to present such exemplary and near ideal heroines, Austen is faced with a
number of problems. Firstly, she needs to show that, in spite of the generally negative
assessments of those around them, Fanny and Anne really are worthy. Secondly,
Austen confronts the difficulties of convincing readers that her exemplary heroines are
in some sense living and breathing rather than ‘flat’ allegorical figures.
23
The Novel
To what extent do you feel Austen is able to overcome these potential difficulties?
What are the primary technical means by which she attempts to transcend these
possible limitations?
Austen’s techniques are complex enough to require careful scrutiny, but in simple
terms it is a skilful and flexible handling of point of view that enables her to succeed
in presenting us with heroines who might otherwise prove totally unsympathetic. If
Fanny Price and possibly Anne Elliot remain less than fully endearing to modern
readers, it is in spite of Austen’s best efforts. By presenting the majority of events
from her heroine’s perspectives, Austen affords us privileged insights unavailable to
the other characters who inhabit the imagined worlds of the novels. More particularly,
Austen opens up the active and intelligent minds of Fanny and Anne to the gaze of
her readers, so that once again the narrative is subtly working to win us over to the
approved values of the heroine.
Think again about how Austen handles point of view in both novels. How does she
prevent the subjective views of Fanny and Anne from overwhelming the objective
concerns of both novels? Now reread Chapter VII of Volume I of Persuasion, paying
particular attention to the way in which Anne responds to her meeting with Captain
Wentworth.
For many readers, the paragraph beginning ‘Mary, very much gratified by this
attention…’ typifies a peculiarly ‘modern’ subjectivism that pervades the novel. By
employing a third-person narrative voice in tandem with a flexible use of focalisation
(the important distinction here is between who ‘speaks’ and who ‘sees’ a particular
narrative event), Austen is able to move freely between interior and exterior views.
This paragraph, for example, begins and ends with apparently exterior views, but in
between moves so close to Anne’s perspective that it might be read as a kind of
‘stream of consciousness’:
…a thousand feelings rushed upon Anne, of which this was the most consoling, that
it would soon be over. And it was soon over. In minutes after Charles’s preparation,
the others appeared; they were in the drawing room. Her eye half met Captain
Wentworth’s; a bow, a curtsey passed; she heard his voice – he talked to Mary, said
all that was right; said something to the Miss Musgroves, enough to mark an easy
footing: the room seemed full – full of persons and voices – but a few minutes ended
it […] the room was cleared, and Anne might finish her breakfast as she could.
Austen succeeds brilliantly here in giving a sense of the rush of emotions and
impressions that assail Anne, but how far can we go with the notion that here and
elsewhere in the novel Austen endorses a subjectivism that verges on solipsism? Look
again at the paragraphs that follow the one quoted above. How, and to what effect,
does Austen employ free indirect speech here? To what extent is a sense of external
and objective values retained in spite of what is clearly sympathy for private
emotional experience?
Clearly, Austen’s use of narrative voice in the novel is intimately bound up with her
broader concerns. Furthermore, that there is considerable debate among readers as to
whether Anne learns to value impulse ahead of reason or vice versa is partly a result
of an inherent ambiguity and, perhaps, ambivalence that stems from Austen’s chosen
techniques. We are in no way obliged, of course, to resolve and close all the questions
that a given novel poses. Indeed, such closure may do some violence to what some
theorists of the novel see as the inherently ‘dialogic’ nature of the novel form.
24
Nevertheless, you might pursue your reading of Persuasion further so as to clarify a

broader understanding of the novel. Is ‘persuasion’ finally seen to be a good or a bad
thing in the novel? You might find it useful to pay especial attention to Wentworth’s
use of the metaphor of the nut in Chapter X, and the events around Louisa’s fall in
Chapter XII.
What values does Austen embody in the Navy and what are the wider social
implications of Anne’s marriage to Captain Wentworth?
Suggestions for further study

As you gain a greater sense of some of the preoccupations of the novel as it developed
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, you might consider how Austen’s fiction
relates to novels that appear otherwise quite different. To what extent, for example,
does Austen share with other novelists since Cervantes an almost obsessive concern
with epistemological questions? What kinds of family resemblances are there between
Austen’s heroines and the protagonists of other nineteenth- and twentieth-century
novels? In these and other ways your study of Austen might easily broaden out into a
consideration of a topic study that would enable you to answer a question in Section
B of the examination paper.
Learning outcomes
By the end of this chapter, having studied the essential reading and some of the
recommended critical texts, you should be able to:
• summarise the debates about Austen’s fiction
• discuss the degree to which her novels are informed by particular historical
concerns
• describe and give examples of some of the techniques Austen employs as part of
the rhetoric of her fiction
• explain what it means to call Austen a ‘realist’, and how such ‘realism’ relates to
other novels and novelistic traditions.
Sample essay questions

1. Consider the significance of one of the following in Austen’s fiction: place,
dialogue, point of view, irony.
2. How useful is the term ‘realism’ in relation to Austen’s fiction?
3. Consider the relationship between any two of Austen’s novels and aspects of
either eighteenth- or nineteenth-century fiction.
4. Consider Austen’s handling of the relationship between the individual and society.
25
The Novel
Notes
26
Chapter 2: Section A author study: Honoré de Balzac (Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot)
Chapter 2
Section A author study: Honoré

de Balzac (Eugénie Grandet and
Old Goriot)
Essential reading
Honoré de Balzac Eugénie Grandet. Translated by Sylvia Raphael; introduced by
Christopher Prendergast. (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1990) [ISBN 0-19-282605-0].
Honoré de Balzac Old Goriot. Translated and edited by A.J. Krailsheimer. (Oxford:
World’s Classics, 1990) [ISBN 0-19-282858-4].
Eugénie Grandet (first published in 1833–4) and Old Goriot (first published 1834) are
regarded as key works in the Balzac canon, both as parts of The Human Comedy
cycle and as works in their own right. Eugénie Grandet was admitted as a text on the
French university syllabus in 1889 and thereby achieved ‘classic’ status. Old Goriot
is, perhaps, more representative of Balzac’s grand project and was the first of his
novels to use the technique of recurrent characterisation: that is, the serial
reappearance of the same character in different novels.
Recommended secondary reading

We recommend that you acquaint yourself with at least two critical commentaries on
The Human Comedy and a biography. The following is not a complete list but is
intended to guide you to some of the more significant studies.
Criticism
Bertault, J. Balzac and The Human Comedy. (New York: New York University Press,
1963) [No ISBN].
Butler, Ronnie Balzac and the French Revolution. (London: Croom Helm, 1983)
[ISBN 0-709-93208-1].
*Festa-McCormick, D. Honoré de Balzac. (Boston: Twayne’s World Authors Series,
1979) [ISBN 0-805-76383-X].
Hemmings, F.W.J. Balzac: an interpretation of la Comédie humaine. (New York:
Random House, 1967) [No ISBN].
Hunt, H.J. Balzac’s ‘Comédie humaine’. (London: Athlone Press, 1964) [No ISBN].
*Lukács, György The Historical Novel. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976)
[ISBN 0-140-55081-X (pbk)].
Marceau, F. Balzac and his World. (London: W.H. Allen, 1967) [No ISBN].
Oliver, E.J. Honoré de Balzac. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1965)
[No ISBN].
Pritchett, V.S. Balzac. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973; London: Hogarth, 1992)
[ISBN 0701209879].
On Eugénie Grandet
*Saxton, Arnold Honoré de Balzac: Eugénie Grandet. (Harmondsworth: Penguin

Masterstudies, 1987) [ISBN 0-140-77137-9].
27
The Novel
On Old Goriot
*Auerbach, Eric Mimesis. Translated by W. Trask. (Princeton : Princeton University

Press, 1953) [ISBN 0691012695 (pbk)]. See part of Chapter 18, ‘In the Hotel de
la Môle’.
Bellos, David Honoré de Balzac, ‘Old Goriot’. (Landmarks of World Literature,
Cambridge University Press, 1987) [ISBN 0-521-31634-0 (pbk); 0-521-32799-7
(hbk)].
Biography
Hunt, H.J. Honoré de Balzac: a Biography. (London, 1957; reprinted and updated,
New York: Greenwood Press, 1969) [No ISBN].
Maurois, André Prometheus: the Life of Balzac. (London: The Bodley Head, 1965)
[No ISBN].
Robb, Graham Balzac: a Biography. (London: Picador, 1994) [ISBN 0-330-33237-6].
Further reading
Bellos, David Balzac Criticism in France. 1850–1900. The Making of a Reputation.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) [ISBN 0-19-815530-1].
Brooks, Peter The Melodramatic Imagination. (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1976; New York: Columbia University Press, 1984)
[ISBN 0231060068; 0231060076].
James, Henry Notes on Novelists, with some other notes. (London: Dent, 1914)
[No ISBN].
James, Henry The Question of Speech; the Lesson of Balzac: Two Lectures.
(Cambridge: Houghton, Mifflin, 1905) [No ISBN].
Kanes, Martin Critical Essays on Honoré de Balzac. (Boston, Mass.: Hall, 1990)
[ISBN 0816188459].
Kanes, Martin Père Goriot: anatomy of a Troubled World. (New York: Twayne;
Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada; New York: Maxwell Macmillan
International, 1993) [ISBN 0805785825 (pbk); 0805783636 (hbk)].
*Levin, Harry The Gates of Horn: a Study of Five French Realists. (London and Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1963) [ISBN 0195007271]. See Chapter IV on Balzac.
*Lukács, György Studies in European Realism. Translated by E. Bone with a
foreword by Roy Pascal. (London: Hillway, 1950; New York: Grosset and
Dunlap, 1964 – introduction by A. Kazin) [No ISBN]. See Chapters I, II and II.
McLaughlin, Kevin Writing in Parts: Imitation and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century
literature. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995) [ISBN 0804724113].
Nochlin, Linda Realism. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990) [ISBN 0-140-13222-8].
*Petrey, Sandy Realism and Revolution: Balzac, Stendhal, Zola and the Performance
of History. (Cornell University Press, 1989) [ISBN 0801422167].
Prendergast, Christopher Balzac, Fiction and Melodrama. (London: Edward Arnold,
1978; New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978) [ISBN 0-713-15969-3].
Prendergast, Christopher The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) [ISBN 0-521-36977-0].
Pugh, Anthony Balzac’s Recurring Characters. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1974) [ISBN 0802052754].
*Reid, James H. Narration and Description in the French Realist Novel: the
Temporality of Lying and Forgetting. (Cambridge Studies in French, 1993)
[ISBN 0-521-42092-X].
Schehr, Lawrence R. Rendering French Realism. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1997) [ISBN 0804727872].
28
Stowe, William W. Balzac, James and the Realistic Novel. (Princeton, N.J.;
Guildford: Princeton University Press, 1983) [ISBN 0691065675].
Taine, Hyppolite Balzac. A Critical Study. Translated by Lorenzo O’Rourke. (New
York: Haskell House, 1973) [ISBN 0838316700].
Introduction
The overall aim of this chapter is to inform and focus your reading of two of the early
novels from Balzac’s The Human Comedy. The core texts belong to Honoré de
Balzac’s (1799–1850) cycle of novels collectively issued under the generic title of The
Human Comedy (La Comédie humaine), published in 17 volumes between 1842 and
1848. Balzac’s aim was that, taken together, they should represent a comprehensive
picture of the social and moral history of France in the early nineteenth century. As
you might expect of such a prolific author, his work has generated an enormous
amount of criticism. The bibliographies above represent a selection of some of the
more accessible secondary material written in English.
The first two sections below provide a contextual discussion of Balzac. They describe
the rationale behind the large project of The Human Comedy and Balzac’s place
within the nineteenth-century tradition of Realist literature. The sections thereafter
deal with the separate issues of:
• characterisation (Balzac’s use of contrast, the character of Vautrin)
• sensation, genre, mystery and melodrama
• themes (the opposition between Paris and the provinces, the motif of money, the
relationship between parents and children)
• narrative voice
• language.
The chapter concludes with a list of learning outcomes and sample examination
questions.
Background
Balzac documented the life of his times in his novels, and so you should make sure
that you understand some of the important events in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century French social and political history – an awareness of some of the key
historical moments will actually enhance your enjoyment of the novels! Eugénie
Grandet, for instance, describes the social and political changes that took place
between the French Revolution in 1789 and the July Revolution of 1830, whereas Old
Goriot is set in 1819–1820, just after Napoleon’s downfall. In Eugénie Grandet we
see Balzac as a commentator on contemporary events; in Old Goriot, he is writing
with the benefit of hindsight.
Familiarise yourself with some of the following key events in the history of France
about which Balzac expected his readers to be well informed:
• Fall of the Bastille in Paris (14 July 1789).
• Declaration of the Rights of Man (27 August 1789).
• Nationalisation of church property (2 November 1789).
• France’s ancient provinces divided into administrative départements (12
November 1789).
• Civil Constitution of the Clergy (12 July 1790).
29
The Novel
• France becomes a constitutional monarchy (3 September 1791).

• Legislative Assembly governs France (October 1791–September 1792).
• French Republic declared (22 September 1792).
• The Jacobins oust the Girondins as the most powerful revolutionary party
(November 1792).
• Execution of Louis XVI (21 January 1793.)
• Coalition against revolutionary France formed by Britain, Austria, Prussia, Spain
and some lesser powers (13 February 1793).
• Committee of Public Safety established in Paris (6 April 1793.)
• Christianity officially abolished (5 October 1793).
• Rules of the Directory established (3 November 1795).
• Napoleon Bonaparte becomes First Consul (December 1799).
• Peace of Amiens (27 March 1802) between Britain and France.
• Renewed war between Britain and France (May 1803).
• Establishment of the (first) Empire (16 May and 2 December 1804).
• French navy defeated by Lord Nelson at Trafalgar (21 October 1805).
• Napoleon defeats Russo–Austrian armies at Austerlitz (2 December 1805).
• A ‘continental system’ binds most of Europe to Napoleonic France (1808).
• Peninsular War begins with British intervention in Portugal (1809).
• Napoleon annexes much of the north European coast from Holland into the Baltic
(1810).
• French invasion of Russia and retreat from Moscow (1812).
• Paris occupied by British and their allies (30 March 1814).
• Louis XVIII enters Paris (3 May 1814).
• Congress of Vienna opens (1 November 1814).
• Napoleon returns to France (1 March 1815) and forces the new king to flee; there
followed ‘The Hundred Days’ terminating in Wellington’s victory at Waterloo (18
June 1815).
• Louis XVIII restored (18 July 1815): ‘The Restoration of the Bourbons’.
• Charles X succeeds to the throne (September 1824).
• Invasion of Algeria (July 1830).
• Charles X abdicates following the July (1830) Revolution in Paris.
• Louis Philippe elected King of the French (7 August 1830).
• censorship of the press and repression of political radicalism (‘The September
Laws’, 1835).
A useful book that puts Balzac in an historical context is Ronnie Butler’s Balzac and
the French Revolution.
30
The Human Comedy cycle

Before we consider in detail the novels Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot let us look
first at the larger framework of The Human Comedy.
Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot were first published as parts of a 12-volume series
entitled Studies of Nineteenth-century Manners, subdivided into three groups: Scenes
of Private Life, Scenes of Provincial Life and Scenes of Parisian Life. Both Eugénie
Grandet and Old Goriot appeared as part of Scenes of Private Life. The three Scenes
were yoked under the general title The Human Comedy in 1841. Balzac’s aim for this
vast, ambitious project was to echo Dante’s Divine Comedy (begun about 1307), and
as a novelist he was concerned not so much with making stories as with providing an
accurate account for his contemporaries of the kind of society in which they were
living. In 1842, in his famous preface to The Human Comedy, he wrote that if French
society was to be the historian then he was to be merely the secretary:
…by making an inventory of vices and virtues, by bringing together the main
products of the passions, by depicting particular types of people, by choosing the
principal events of society, by composing types by bringing together features from
several different individuals, I would perhaps manage to write the history that so
many historians forget to write, that of manners and customs.
He went on to say that his aim was ‘to create a world with its own parish registers’.
And he claimed that the world he carried round in his head and put down on paper
was more real, more interesting, than the world in which he was actually living. One
of the most famous stories about him concerns Eugénie Grandet – both the novel and
the character who gives it its title. In 1833, at the time when he was writing Eugénie
Grandet, Balzac was at a Parisian café with some friends. They were debating the
nature of French provincial society, when he suddenly interrupted the conversation
and said ‘Yes, yes, all this is very interesting, but let’s talk about something more
important. Who is going to marry Eugénie Grandet?’ This merging of the real and the
fictional is one of the defining features of The Human Comedy project.
Balzac described French society in such detail and with such thoroughness that
French readers of the time read his novels not just for entertainment but also for
information. His novels were regarded as compellingly written narratives with strong
characters and humour and as social documents. This was part of Balzac’s original
scheme. He wanted to depict the different facets of French cultural life as realistically
as possible, and he sought to describe all areas of social life – urban, provincial and
rural. In the preface to Eugénie Grandet in 1833, Balzac claimed that in writing this
novel he was filling a gap in the literature of his time by dealing with life in the
provinces, and the way he juxtaposed life in the capital with life in the provinces was
of particular interest to the contemporary reader. In his pursuit of ‘real life’ Balzac
researched his novels. His descriptions of the provinces in the 1820s were often based
on real places, as indeed some of his characters were based on real people. This
Realism has inspired many French critics and scholars to try to map his fictional
worlds against actual French locations. In the French editions there is much detailed
information in the introductions and notes about which town Balzac is actually
referring to.
‘Comédie’ in French denotes drama or theatre. How does Balzac set the stage for action
in Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot? Look carefully at the opening paragraphs of the
novels, and the way the author describes interiors and landscapes. To what extent does
Balzac’s description of things serve as indexes to the inner lives of characters?
31
The Novel
In the preface of 1842, Balzac drew an explicit analogy between his grand literary
project and the classificatory disciplines of history and science. The organisation of
his fiction under the overarching title The Human Comedy was an attempt to emulate
the zoological sciences that grouped animals in terms of species and sub-species. The
human world, in his view, was also composed of genres and sub-genres, comparable
to the animal world’s division into ‘species’. (Note that Old Goriot is dedicated to a
zoologist called Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.) In studying Eugénie Grandet and Old
Goriot, we must remember that they fit into a larger project, and they were intended
to represent variations on the theme of human social life.
Consider the implications of Balzac’s adoption of a taxonomical (that is,

classificatory) model for structuring his fiction. Think about the consequences that this
might have for the structure of not only the entire Human Comedy but the structure of
individual novels within the larger framework. What stresses does Balzac’s notion of a
‘grand scheme’ have for the writer in general? What narrative strategies might a writer
employ to create a sense of unity and coherence? Think about the Aristotelian notions
of time and place, and also the role and function of characters.
Realism
In the nineteenth century Realism reflected, in the most direct way, the new social and
political conditions of nineteenth-century man and woman. The culmination of the
Enlightenment in first the American and then the French Revolutions gave Western
humanity the material conditions in which self-consciousness about issues like
Realism became possible. The move towards political and social democracy in France
was particularly significant for Realism, because art and literature also became
democratised. The middle classes (which were rapidly growing in number) and the
poor had been previously ignored, but in the nineteenth century they became
important subjects for Realist writers and painters. Nothing was regarded as too
ignoble or ugly to be painted. In Émile Zola’s novel The Masterpiece (1886), for
example, the artist-hero, Charles Lantier, prefers to find inspiration in a pile of
cabbages rather than the picturesque medievalism of the Romantics. So Realism
gained strength in the nineteenth century and it was associated, particularly in France,
with the expression of new, radical forces. Although Realist modes of writing were
established before the nineteenth century, Realism as a conscious mode was not
possible, because individual perceptions of external reality were bound up still with
metaphysical systems of belief and faith.
The novels of Balzac reflect these social and political changes, and The Human
Comedy can be read as his attempt to represent contemporary French society in all
its manifestations – the worst aspects alongside the best. In Eugénie Grandet and Old
Goriot, Balzac is not interested in revisiting historical moments: his stories reside in
the present, where he finds his inspiration and material. He tells the story of his own
times and life in post-revolutionary France. He had what Linda Nochlin has described
in her book Realism as an enthusiasm for giving a ‘truthful, objective and impartial
representation of the real world, based on a meticulous observation of contemporary
life’. Contemporaneity was, she maintains, the most crucial element in Realist writing
and painting. The past was no longer seen as the sole subject for art. It had to be
about the here and now – what was tangible and visible, and could be established by
material fact.
Karl Marx admired Balzac’s novels because he said that Balzac understood class
society. In Volume 3 of Das Kapital (1894), Marx described Balzac as ‘a novelist who
is in general distinguished by his profound grasp of real conditions’. Balzac
understood the social and economic shift away from the aristocratic in France to the
32
mechanical and the bourgeois. He understood the nature of the underclass, the
‘Parisian catspaws’ as he described them, ‘who do not even know the names of those
whose chestnuts they pull out of the fire’ (Old Goriot, Chapter 1). Balzac’s sensitivity
to the details of French society, from the highest to the lowest echelons, probably
inspired Somerset Maugham’s comment in Ten Novels and Their Authors (1954) that
Balzac was a ‘vulgar little man’. This method of surveying and detailing the entire
organism, the entire social spectrum, becomes a defining feature of writers, artists,
philosophers and scientists right across Europe in the nineteenth century.
The Realist novelist is often described metaphorically as a doctor who examines the
parts of anatomy to understand the whole. How successful do you think this
metaphor is for describing the work of Balzac? You might like to consider Chapter 15
of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2), where the reference to the processes of
medical research may be taken as a metaphor for the approach of the Realist writer.
Balzac described his role as a writer in 1833 as that of a humble copyist, but this
comment should not be taken at face value. The French existentialist writer and critic,
Jean-Paul Sartre, made reference to the complex notion of Balzac’s Realism in his
novel, Nausea (1938), where the main character, seated to dine at a provincial
restaurant, is trying to read a passage in Eugénie Grandet concerning a conversation
between Eugénie and her mother. He is however distracted from his reading by a
conversation at a neighbouring table and is struck by the difference between the ‘real-
life’ conversation – personal, fragmentary and incomprehensible – and the so-called
‘realistic’ conversation in the novel – structured and coherent. You might like to
consider the notion of ‘realistic’ in relation to your own reading of these two novels
by Balzac.
To what extent does Balzac transcribe in a literal sense his own life and times? How
does he ‘shape’ his material into fiction? Is it useful to see his characters as life-like
or larger than life? Some critics have described his approach as ‘imperialist’ rather
than Realist. What do you think they mean by that?
Characterisation
Balzac’s novels teem with characters.
You might find it useful, after reading the novels, to ‘map’ the characters against the
narrative structure – make a list of them, noting when they appear and how they
relate to one another.
In Old Goriot, for example, there are the microcosms of the Maison Vauquer and the
fashionable parts of Paris. In the Maison Vauquer, there is a hierarchy of characters
that corresponds to the physical structure of the boarding-house and the amounts paid
as rent by the boarders – Old Goriot, Eugène de Rastignac, Mademoiselle Taillefer,
Vautrin, Mademoiselle Michonneau, Poiret, Madame Vauquer, and others such as
Bianchon, the medical student. In the fashionable areas of Paris, we meet Viscountess
de Beauséant, Countess Anastasie de Restaud, Baroness Delphine de Nucingen, the
Duchess de Langeais and various noblemen. In Eugénie Grandet, the story revolves
around the town of Saumur, at the centre of which is the Grandet household
consisting of Old Grandet himself, Madame Grandet, Eugénie, Nanon and,
temporarily, Charles. Around this group are the satellite figures of the townsfolk –
among whom the most prominent are the Cruchots and the Grassins, whose sole aim
is to lay claim to Grandet’s enormous wealth. By mapping the characters and their
33
The Novel
environments in the way described above, thereby establishing their importance in the
novel and their interrelationships, you will, hopefully, see the complex nature and
comprehensive scope of Balzac’s writing.
Focus on the treatments of the servant figures in the novels – Nanon and Fat Sylvie.
How does Balzac relate their social role to their function in the narrative structure?
Contrast
The texture of Balzac’s writing is frequently created by contrast of one kind or other.
Contrast was one of the main principles around which Balzac constructed his novels,
and he made particular use of character contrast. In Eugénie Grandet, the callous
indifference of the worthless Charles, who, we are told ‘provided…a strange contrast
to the worthy provincials, who were already rather sickened by his aristocratic
manners’ (Chapter 2), is juxtaposed against the devoted and trusting Eugénie. Look at
Section 4 and study the comparison drawn between Grandet’s betrayal of the regional
winegrowers and Charles’s betrayal of Eugénie. Indeed we might even point to a
larger contrast between the moral behaviour of men and women in this novel. The
miser Grandet lacks a moral sense and we see this in his behaviour and attitude to his
wife. His nephew Charles also abuses the woman who loves him – he takes Eugénie’s
money and departs. Only the women show a glimmering of human feelings, but they
are a constituency without power (or money).
Do you agree with this view? Compare the presentation of female characters in both
novels.
As well as arranging his characters in ways that invite comparison, Balzac uses
character as a lens through which we view the vices and virtues of nineteenth-century
French society. In Old Goriot, for example, Parisian society is shown to be greedy,
corrupt and unjust through the thoughts and actions of greedy, corrupt and unjust
individuals. As Diana Festa-McCormick claims in her book, Honoré de Balzac
(1979):
Hardly a manifestation of the human condition is left unstirred; all desires, conscious
and unconscious, licit and illicit, are given life within the hearts of the characters. We
catch their expressions as we would in real life, through actions or words, a gesture, a
revealing glance, the tone of a voice, a hidden tear, a smile or laughter. We discern
the nuances as the student Rastignac himself learns to do. (p.78)
What does Eugène de Rastignac learn as he journeys across Paris, between the
Maison Vauquer and Madame de Bauséant’s palace, in search of personal fulfilment
and professional success?
Vautrin
Much has been written about the character of Vautrin (based on a real criminal who
became the Chief of Police). He functions in a more complex way than other
characters in Old Goriot in that he not only reflects the dysfunctional nature of urban
life, but he also serves as the vehicle for Balzac’s own bitter feelings about French
society. Vautrin is a figure of temptation and revolt rather like Satan in Milton’s
Paradise Lost, but rather than against God, his revolt is against Man, and he uses
Eugène de Rastignac in order to triumph and dominate.
Look at the long conversation between Rastignac and Vautrin in the garden (Chapter
2). Is Balzac presenting us with a modern Garden of Eden scene? Note the ways in
which Vautrin criticises society, and consider in particular his advice to Rastignac
about adopting the same unscrupulous means as society in order to win through. How
do you think this relates to Balzac’s own views about the state of Restoration France?
34
Sensation, genre, mystery and melodrama

The deathbed scenes in the novels are sites for melodrama, and you should think
about the way that Balzac weaves together Realism and sensation, genre, mystery and
melodrama. The combination of these elements accounted for the contemporary
popular appeal of Old Goriot, although one critic observed that Balzac’s ‘passion for
truth was often in conflict with his lust for marvels’.
Do you agree with this comment that there is a conflict between these two
tendencies, or does Balzac effect a successful compromise?
Look carefully at the portrayal of the characters of Goriot and Vautrin, for example.
Consider the aura of mystery that surrounds both these characters at the opening of
the story, and then compare this with the sensational and melodramatic death of
Goriot and the arrest of Vautrin later on. How does the sensation, genre, mystery and
melodrama surrounding the lives of these two characters contrast with the realistic
portrayal of Rastignac and the Maison Vauquer? How does Balzac gradually build a
picture of Vautrin, one of his most celebrated characters, throughout the novel? Make
a list of instances where Vautrin is seen though the eyes of others and where his
character makes a more direct appeal to us through his own speech and action.
There is one final point about Balzac’s characterisation that must be made before we
move on, and that is his innovative use of recurrent characters. One of the ways in
which he attempted to interrelate his novels was by creating characters who would
reappear across the whole œuvre. He first employed this technique in Old Goriot, and
the characters in this novel who resurface across The Human Comedy cycle include
Anastasie Restaud, Madame de Bauséant and Rastignac. Vautrin appears in several
novels, including Lost Illusions (Illusions Perdues) and The Splendours and Miseries
of Courtesans (Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes).
Themes
Paris and the provinces
The opposition between the city and the country goes back at least as far as the
Alexandrian poets of the third century BC, but it also became a preoccupation of
French Realist writers and artists in the nineteenth century, including Balzac, Gustave
Flaubert and Zola. They were interested in the effects of industrialisation and
technology on traditional modes of life, and the role played by Paris as the cultural
and economic centre of France. The difference between life in the capital and life in
the provinces becomes a common theme in their novels. In Old Goriot, for example,
Rastignac, a young man from the provinces, becomes corrupted by Paris, and in
Eugénie Grandet, Charles Grandet arrives at Saumur from the capital and looks down
his nose at his provincial relatives. In many ways, Balzac is conducting an experiment
through his fiction. By placing provincial characters in the city and urban types in the
provinces, we the readers are able to witness the effects of the environment on the
individual. In Old Goriot, Paris itself is subdivided into rich and poor areas.
Make some notes on the way Paris and the provinces are portrayed in the novels.
How does Balzac establish a tension between the different districts of Saint Marceau
and Saint Germain in Old Goriot? What kind of appeal would his interest in
provincial life have for the contemporary reader? How does Balzac characterise the
existence of city dwellers in particular? How do other Realist writers of the period
depict modern city life?
35
The Novel
Money
The exuberance of the money-making process, it can be argued, is the real subject of
all Balzac’s novels. He was very interested in money, as were his readers, who looked
to some of his novels as practical guides to understanding the complex notions of
stocks, shares and equity.
The theme of money is explored in the greatest detail in Eugénie Grandet and the
story of Grandet’s miserliness and its effects on all those around him. Grandet makes
a lot of money by understanding the way society works, and his manipulation of
finance can be read as an example of what happened in France after 1789 when land
owned by the Church was nationalised and subsequently bought not by the poor
landless peasants who worked on it, but by the rich in the towns. Through his
purchase of such land Grandet makes his fortune, and the novel describes his
obsession with wealth and his efforts to maximise profit at the expense of human life.
As a social Realist, Balzac lays bare in many of his novels the workings of a society
increasingly dominated by commercial interests and the lustre of money. The opening
description of Madame Vauquer’s boarders in Old Goriot, for example, sorts and
grades them in terms of how much they pay or are worth. The ‘seven boarders were
Madame Vauquer’s spoiled children, and she distributed her attentions and favours
among them with an astronomer’s precision according to the sum of money each
paid’ (Section 1). In Eugénie Grandet, the miser Grandet takes on some of the
characteristics of the gold he covets, and we are given extensive descriptions of
financial transactions. With the money he has acquired through the buying-up of land
Grandet acquires government stock, and this allows him to speculate – he is extremely
good at this, knowing when, for example, to sell his gold for paper money.
In what ways can we read the financial dealings of Grandet as an illustration of the
financial growth and development of France in the nineteenth century? How is the
handling of money used to symbolise character?
Parents and children

Both novels have at their centre monomaniac figures (Goriot and Grandet) whose
decline and fall are described as relating to their neglect of family values and their
single-minded pursuit of a single desire. Both stories end tragically. Goriot, like
Shakespeare’s King Lear, is spurned by his daughters who unfeelingly squander his
gifts in order to achieve a higher social standing. In Eugène de Rastignac he finds an
alternative substitute son. There are many similarities between the story of King Lear
and Old Goriot. Look at the final scenes where Goriot is slowly dying. The ravings of
the old noodle merchant contain painful truths, which reveal to Eugène de Rastignac
the imperfect but real nature of society. The monomania of Grandet is similarly
overwhelming, but, unlike Goriot, he is incapable of loving his wife and daughter
more than his wealth and power. Even on his deathbed he refuses to renounce his
materialism. ‘Take good care of everything,’ he says to his daughter, ‘You will have to
account to me for all of it in the next world.’ (Chapter 5)
By what particular means does Balzac represent parental authority? How does the
story of Old Goriot differ from Shakespeare’s King Lear? Are these moral tales?
What do we learn through the characters of Eugène de Rastignac and Eugénie?
Narrative voice
A major feature of Balzac is the extent to which he intervenes as author and narrator
in his novels to address the reader, telling us what to think and how to read. Unlike his
contemporaries, Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant, Balzac did not cultivate a
36
transparent narrative voice. Instead, he exercises an authority in his novels, urging us

to see the world as he sees it. Unable to stomach Balzac’s self-assured rhetoric, the
critic Roland Barthes claimed that reading the novels actually made him sick.
Find places in Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot where Balzac makes his presence felt.
Consider, for example, Balzac’s commentaries on the life of a young girl in Chapter 3
of Eugénie Grandet. What are we supposed to make of his intervention? Can you find
other instances in the novels where Balzac asserts his views? How may we reconcile
Balzac’s forceful intrusions with his assertion that he is a ‘humble copyist’?
Language
You are obviously reading Balzac’s novels in translation, and it would be difficult to
analyse some of the linguistic structures in detail, but you might consider Balzac’s use
of language as either a way of revealing the interrelationships between individuals or
as a kind of coinage, as something traded by individuals for certain benefits or
material gains. This latter notion of language as a form of currency is an old one
(think about the phrase ‘to coin a phrase’ for example).
Two particular episodes are worth noting in this connection. In Old Goriot, the
conversational nuances of the French working class are played out hilariously by the
boarders who, when together, often lapse into ‘talking rama’ (Section 1). ‘Rama’ is a
verbal game that unites the boarders, who gain a certain coherence as a community
through a shared language. This episode provides comic relief in the story, but it also
demonstrates Balzac’s acute sensitivity to the world in which he lived. He was
extremely attuned to the changing nuances of everyday speech. ‘Rama’, as Balzac
states, refers to the recent inventions of the Diorama and Panorama – visual
constructions that permit a comprehensive survey of a subject – both of which might
be described as the model for Balzac’s own approach in surveying the entire structure
of society.
In Eugénie Grandet language is manipulated by Grandet the miser to achieve a certain
result in a financial deal. In Chapter 4 he pretends to have speech and hearing defects
with the intention of ‘wearing out the patience of his business opponent and of
keeping him so busy trying to express Grandet’s thoughts that the opponent lost sight
of his own.’ Language is used expertly here to buy time and hence to win a deal: it is,
in effect, a literal example of ‘linguistic coinage’.
Are there other episodes where language is used in a particular way to reveal
something about the nature of nineteenth-century French society?
37
The Novel
Learning outcomes
By the end of this chapter and the relevant reading, you should be able to:
• demonstrate familiarity with some of the key events in French cultural history in
the nineteenth century and relate them to the historical settings of Balzac’s novels
• situate Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot within the larger scheme of The Human
Comedy
• define and apply the term ‘Realism’ to Balzac’s writing
• identify some of the ways in which structure is provided by characterisation
• trace the development of certain themes in Balzac’s novels, especially those
relating to moral, social and economic issues
• describe Balzac’s narrative voice
• approach the work of other Realist writers using your familiarity with Balzac’s
approach to his subject.

1. In what ways can Balzac’s work be seen as reflecting the nineteenth-century
obsession with scientific enquiry? Discuss with reference to at least two novels.
2. Discuss the notion of social class in Balzac’s novels.
3. In 1834, Balzac wrote, ‘It was necessary in order to be complete, to show a moral
sewer of Paris that gives the effect of a disgusting sore’. What contrast does
Balzac make between the city and the provinces? Discuss with reference to at
least two novels.
4. To what extent can we read Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot as the stories of
rebellion by children against their parents?
38
Chapter 3: Section B topic study: modern Gothic
Chapter 3
Section B topic study: modern

Gothic
Essential reading
John Fowles (1963) The Collector. (London: Vintage, 1998) [ISBN 009974371X].
Iris Murdoch (1963) The Unicorn. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987)
[ISBN 014002476X].
Please note that new paperback editions of modern novels like these frequently
appear. You may use any edition that you find convenient.

On modern Gothic
Not a great deal has been published on modern Gothic specifically (though there is
masses on ‘traditional’ Gothic). The only full-length text on the topic is:
Sage, Victor Modern Gothic: A Reader. (Manchester: Manchester University Press,

1996) [ISBN 0-219-04208-9].
Two essays are recommended:
Moore-Gilbert, Bart ‘The Return of the Repressed: Gothic and the 1960s novel’ in
Moore-Gilbert, Bart and John Seed (eds) Cultural Revolution?: The Challenge of
the Arts in the 1960s. (London: Routledge, 1992) [ISBN 0-415-07825-3]
181–200.
Stevenson, Randall ‘Contemporary Gothic’ in his The British Novel Since the
Thirties: An Introduction. (London: Batsford, 1986) [ISBN 0-7134-4664-1]
184–89.
On Fowles
This selection covers texts with useful material on The Collector.
Conradi, Peter John Fowles. (London: Macmillan, 1982) [ISBN 0-333-32846-9].

Kane, Richard Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and John Fowles: Didactic Demons in
Modern Fiction. (London: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988)
[ISBN 0838633242].
Loveday, Simon The Romances of John Fowles. (London, Macmillan, 1988)
[ISBN 0333444825 (pbk)].
On Murdoch
This selection covers texts with useful material on The Unicorn.
Byatt, A.S. (1970) Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch. (London:
Vintage, 1994) [ISBN 0099302241].
Dipple, Elizabeth Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit. (London: Methuen, 1982)
[ISBN 0-416-31290-X].
Gerstenberger, Donna Iris Murdoch. (London: Associated Universities Press, 1975)
[ISBN 0-8387-7731-7].
39
The Novel
Kane, Richard Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and John Fowles: Didactic Demons in
Modern Fiction. (London: Associated Universities Press, 1988)
[ISBN 1087-04575-4].
Scholes, Robert Fabulation and Metafiction. (London: University of Chicago Press,
1967) [ISBN 0-252-00704-2].
Introduction
The aim of this chapter is to introduce you to one of the most widely used genres in
contemporary Western novel writing and to consider larger questions such as: what is
a genre? and how and why do genres change and develop in literary history?
The history of Gothic

To illustrate one Section B topic study, we shall be offering a genre study of modern
Gothic. Gothic has, of course, had a long and controversial history since its
emergence in the mid-eighteenth century with texts such as Walpole’s Castle of
Otranto and Beckford’s Vathek. It flourished in the Romantic period (approximately
1780–1830) in the hands of writers like Anne Radcliffe, M.G. Lewis, Charles Maturin
and Mary Shelley.
The early phase of Gothic is covered in two other subject guides: it would be a great
advantage to you to consult them to get a more detailed historical sense of the genre
and its characteristic themes and conventions. They are the Personal study
programme and the Romanticism units. It would be even more advantageous if you
could read one or two examples of Gothic from earlier periods. If time is pressing,
select short texts (some Romantic Gothic fictions, in particular, are extremely long).
Gothic continued to provide an inspiration to Victorian fiction, too, where it resurfaces

in writers as diverse as Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Towards
the end of the nineteenth century it experienced something of a revival in works like
R.L. Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray and
Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It was also exploited by Modernist writers like Henry James,
whose The Turn of the Screw is widely considered to be a classic of the genre, and
Joseph Conrad. Conrad’s The Secret Sharer and Heart of Darkness both have
substantial Gothic elements. Virginia Woolf, moreover, wrote sympathetically about it
as a genre in which women writers had been prominent and particularly adept.
In addition to these early works, women are also very prominent in the contemporary
revival of Gothic. You might want to think about why they have been so attracted to
the genre throughout its history.
Gothic never entirely died out as a resource for serious writers in the period
1900–1960, as some of the work of Evelyn Waugh and Mervyn Peake, especially,
suggests. However it certainly fell into critical disfavour, as is indicated by the work
of the Leavises, two of the most important literary critics in the period 1930–1960. In
Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), Q.D. Leavis railed against its ‘clumsy call for
tears, pity, shudders and so forth’ and was strongly critical of writers like Charlotte
Brontë and Dickens, who were most interested in its possibilities. After the war, her
husband F.R. Leavis sustained the attack. Revaluation (1956), for instance, dismissed
what it described as ‘the trashy fantasies and cheap excitements of the Terror school’
as unworthy of any serious attention. Thus when D.P. Varma wrote his study of the
genre, The Gothic Flame, in 1957 his tone was largely elegiac; Gothic is seen as a
purely historical phenomenon, a genre which had nothing to offer the serious
contemporary writer.
40
Gothic nonetheless continued to flourish in the period 1930–60 in the domain of

‘popular’ culture. In the post-war era, it took forms as diverse as the ‘horror’ fiction of
bestsellers like Dennis Wheatley and, above all, cinema. The Hammer House of
Horror series began in 1957, inspired by the success of Hollywood Gothic in the
1930s and endless versions of the Dracula and Frankenstein stories helped Hammer to
become one of the most successful British film houses over the next 20 years. With
‘Psycho’ and ‘The Birds’ (both 1963), moreover, Alfred Hitchcock demonstrated that
‘horror’ retained the potential not just for sensation, but for psychological
investigations of considerable subtlety and power. From around 1960, Gothic once
more began to claim the interest of ‘serious’ writers.
As the Suggestions for further study in this chapter demonstrate, it was not just
Fowles and Murdoch who became aware of the potential of Gothic in this period.
Indeed, aside from the authors mentioned there, many other more recent British and
American writers have reworked the genre, to the extent that it has now become one
of the dominant genres in contemporary writing. Its critical rehabilitation has been
equally impressive. Since the late 1970s a vast number of books have been published
on the genre, notable among which are Tzvetan Todorov’s The Fantastic (1978),
David Punter’s The Literature of Terror (1983), Rosemary Jackson’s Fantasy: The
Literature of Subversion (1983), Chris Baldick’s In the Shadow of Frankenstein
(1991) and Fred Botting’s Gothic (1996).
Gothic elements in Fowles and Murdoch

In the first instance, both Fowles and Murdoch affiliate themselves to the Gothic by
placing their work in an explicit relationship to earlier examples of the genre. In her
important essay of 1959, The Sublime and Beautiful Revisited, Iris Murdoch praises
Emily Brontë, Hawthorne, Melville and Dostoevsky as writers ‘to whom we would
not want to deny a first place’ in the literary hall of fame; this is clear recognition of
the achievement of a by then largely marginalised tradition, the resources of which
she herself was to explore in the next decade. (The title of Murdoch’s essay echoes
not just Kant, but also Burke, whose Inquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1756)
provided a critical manifesto for eighteenth-century and Romantic Gothic.) The
ominous opening of Murdoch’s The Unicorn, moreover, explicitly recalls Harker’s
approach to the Count’s castle in Dracula, and a series of scenes link the central
figure, Hannah Crean-Smith, to Dracula himself. Hannah also resembles the
protagonist of Carmilla, another Gothic fiction by Sheridan Le Fanu, a nineteenth-
century Anglo–Irish writer for whom Murdoch has expressed her admiration.
What effect does this invocation of Dracula have on our perception of Hannah? How
does it complicate our perception of Hannah as a victim? What are the implications
of Murdoch’s re-gendering of the Dracula figure as female?
Fowles is equally fascinated by earlier phases of Gothic. Thus while The French
Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) cannot really be considered a Gothic novel, it is nonetheless
significant that the model for Sarah Woodruff’s elusive ‘double’ identity is Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde, which Fowles’ narrator describes as ‘the best guidebook to the age’. By
contrast, The Collector refers explicitly to Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw.
At the level of motif, too, these novels reveal their generic lineage. Let’s have a look
at The Collector. First of all it is in the form of a tale within a tale, like Shelley’s
Frankenstein, Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner and James’ The Turn of the
Screw and, as is often the case with these forebears, both frame and inner narratives
are mediated by unreliable narrators. The Unicorn has something of the apparently
rambling or expansive structure of many Romantic Gothic texts, with a continual
proliferation of new plot-lines and unexpected twists. Fowles’ text has a governess
41
The Novel
figure, Miranda, who recalls the protagonist in James’ The Turn of the Screw. Marion
Taylor in The Unicorn is another governess (or companion) figure who is made to
face the limitations of her own knowledge by her ‘charge’. Many earlier Gothic texts
focus on orphan figures and, of course, Clegg too is an orphan in the Fowles novel.
Earlier Gothic is often preoccupied with extreme states of mind – even ‘madness’ –
and clearly there is strong evidence for seeing both Hannah and Clegg as in some
sense ‘mad’.
To what extent are Clegg and Hannah ‘mad’ or simply extremely clever or
manipulative?
In terms of the physical settings of the novels, note how the architectural conventions
of earlier Gothic return. While Clegg’s house is not to be compared in grandeur with
the castles and monasteries of Romantic Gothic, like them it is very old (built in
1625), it is isolated, it is claustrophobic and has a basement room, once a priest’s
hole, that functions as a kind of dungeon.
What uses does Murdoch’s novel make of the architecture of the great house?
Suspense and horror, so characteristic of earlier Gothic, are heightened in

contemporary equivalents like The Collector and The Unicorn by similar plot
conventions, including kidnap and imprisonment – mental as well as physical. Finally,
as in Romantic Gothic, violence of manifold kinds and sexual ‘deviancy’, including
incest (hinted at in Hannah’s marriage to her cousin), voyeurism and sado-masochism
recur in the work of Murdoch and Fowles.
What attitudes do Fowles and Murdoch invite us to take towards ‘deviant’ sexuality?
To what extent are they challenging the dominant discourses about sexuality current
before 1960? Can these novels be considered ‘permissive’ on the issue of sexuality?
But there are important differences, too, between contemporary Gothic and its earlier
forms. Modern Gothic usually has a surface realism that allows the reader to suspend
disbelief in the face of apparently extreme events and situations. It tends to
‘domesticate’ many of the genre’s established conventions, so that settings which are
traditionally distanced in time or space are so now only vestigially or symbolically.
When and where is Murdoch’s novel set? Is it set in England? What is the
significance of these aspects of its setting?
The same is true of social settings in modern Gothic. Although The Unicorn is set
among ‘the gentry’, most modern Gothic – like The Collector – prefers a more
ordinary social milieu than the religious orders or aristocracy favoured by Romantic
Gothic. In certain respects Clegg is quite ordinary.
What factors make Clegg appear so ordinary?
Most obviously, the often unambiguously supernatural aspect of earlier Gothic

disappears; ghosts, vampires and monsters survive only metaphorically, within a
psychologically realistic framework. Possession, for instance, as in the case of Clegg or
Gerald Scottow, or even Pip Lejour and Effingham Cooper, is transformed into
obsession. Each behaves ‘monstrously’ without ever threatening to become non-human.
The ‘domestication’ of modern Gothic relates to one of its most important insights, that
the everyday and the ‘normal’ may be sources of horror and terror quite as potent as
anything conceived of by earlier Gothic. In contemporary Gothic, domestic violence can
42
be as sickening as any of the torture scenes in Romantic Gothic; an apparently

innocuous neighbour or friend may become a ‘monster’ (consider the current spate of
child-abuse scandals), and family and friends can be emotional ‘vampires’.
The cultural politics of modern Gothic

The Collector is a particularly good example of how modern Gothic undermines
cultural and political categories like the ‘normal’ and the ‘perverse’, the ‘good’ and
the ‘bad’, or the ‘sane’ and the ‘mad’. Ostensibly, it seems quite easy to place Clegg
in traditional moral terms; after all, his kidnapping and imprisonment of Miranda
leads directly to her death. Even in his day-to-day treatment of her, Clegg is often vile.
Collect some examples of Clegg’s behaviour which seem to you particularly

reprehensible.
It is similarly tempting to dismiss Clegg as simply mad. Miranda, certainly, describes

him as ‘possessed, quite out of his own control’. On Clegg’s trip to Lewes after his
victim’s death, it occurs to him, too, that he is insane:
I kept remembering how people in Lewes seemed to look at me sometimes, like the
people in that doctor’s waiting-room. They all knew I was mad.
But despite the invitation to judge Clegg in such black and white terms, a number of
factors prevent the reader from responding so simply. Perhaps the most important
reason for this is the way that Clegg is portrayed not simply as a ‘perverse’ individual,
which on one level he undoubtedly is, but as representative – even stereotypically so –
of a variety of attitudes which Fowles sees as characteristic of ‘mainstream society’.
At one point in her diary, Miranda writes about the working-class protagonists of
celebrated 1950s writers like John Braine and Alan Sillitoe. She finds Sillitoe’s
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1959) particularly disquieting and criticises the
author in the following terms: ‘Perhaps Alan Sillitoe wanted to attack the society that
produces such people. But he doesn’t make it clear’. This seems to provide a clue
about Fowles’ real interest in this novel; he is fascinated not so much by the pathology
of a single individual, but by the way that society has helped to ‘produce’ Clegg’s
behaviour. The issue is highlighted by Clegg’s use of language.
What kind of language does Clegg use? Is it ‘original’ to him? If not, where does it
come from? What is Miranda’s view of his language? How might one argue that,
rather than language bestowing upon Clegg autonomy and subjectivity, it seems
rather to confirm him as ‘subject’ – in the sense of being subject to, or subjected to,
the social order which language both constructs and embodies?
This lack of subjectivity is partly evident in Clegg’s lack of imagination and the
automatic way that he so often responds to Miranda. His articulation of linguistic
cliché underlines his reproduction of stereotypical forms of behaviour which
obviously originate in the society outside him. For example, great stress is laid upon
the way that Clegg constructs his self-image and thus his sense of identity, by
translating his experience into and out of the narrative forms of the mass media
culture which surrounds him. Before actually meeting Miranda, for instance, Clegg
admits: ‘I used to think of stories where I met her, did things she admired, married her
and all that’.
When plotting the kidnap, what narratives does Clegg employ? Collect other
examples of Clegg’s self-perception in terms of the narratives of the ‘popular’ media.
How significant is this pattern of self-construction?
43
The Novel
Despite Clegg’s emphasis on his isolation and alienation from the society around him,
which might incline the reader to dismiss him as a freak, it is quite obvious in other
ways how ‘deeply conventional’ he is. Even in his appearance, Clegg unconsciously
attempts to approximate to a particular stylistic and semiotic ‘norm’. Miranda notes
how his ‘trousers always have creases, his shirts are always clean. I really think he’d
be happier if he wore starched collars’. His attitude to art is also deeply conventional.
When Miranda asks him to choose among her drawings, Clegg ‘picked all those that
looked most like the wretched bowl of fruit’.
Gender issues
But there are more important ways in which Clegg’s conventionality manifests itself.
In his expectations of gender roles and interaction, he conforms to the role expected
of an old-fashioned ‘nice young man’. Thus he paradoxically treats Miranda at times
as a ‘guest’, which Miranda sees as expressive of a peculiar kind of ‘chivalry’. He is
forever behaving ‘according to some mad notion of the “proper thing to do”’. Indeed,
their relationship sometimes seems troublingly close to a conventionally romantic
one, as when Miranda tries to teach him to dance or when he takes her for the star-lit
night-walk. At times, Clegg plays the attentive husband: ‘I got her breakfast…she
gave me any shopping she wanted done…I cleaned up the house after I got back’.
By the same token, of course, Clegg attempts to make Miranda conform to the
behaviour he deems appropriate to her status a ‘nice young woman’. He is thus
horrified when she uses ‘unfeminine’ language and is deeply upset when Miranda
‘offers’ herself to him. Indeed his disappointment at such behaviour, arguably, marks
the turning point of the novel, after which Miranda is doomed. What Fowles appears
to allegorise, in such horrifying fashion, in this parody of the norm is the potential for
the ‘normal’ marriage, similarly, to imprison and deform.
Now consider similar issues in Murdoch’s novel. What expectations do Marion and
Effingham have of ‘romantic’ love? Are these expectations any less coercive or
damaging than those which Clegg holds? What is Hannah’s view of love? What are
both authors saying about ‘modern love’?
Clegg’s misogyny is clearly echoed by the society around him. Again, the very clichés
he uses show the extent to which this is the case. After one argument with Miranda,
Clegg comments: ‘She was just like a woman. Unpredictable. Smiling one minute and
spiteful the next’. Appalled by Miranda’s ‘forwardness’, Clegg again retreats behind
stereotype. ‘You’ve got a one-track mind, just like every woman’. The way that Clegg
sees Miranda as something to collect – it ‘was like catching the mazarine Blue again’
– is part of a larger process of the reification (i.e. objectification) of women, for
example in the advertisements which so often precondition Clegg’s expectations about
Miranda. He comments with acerbic justice on the newspapers’ treatment of the
kidnapping: ‘If she was ugly it would all have been two lines on the back page’.
The violence that Clegg manifests towards his victim is also troublingly present in
society at large. He fantasises about hitting Miranda across the face ‘as I saw it done
once by a chap in a telly play’. His sexual expectations also seem conditioned by the
pornography which society licenses and circulates. For example, he is much taken
with a work called Shoes, from which, he confesses, ‘I got some ideas’. Given the
overlap between Clegg’s behaviour and what is deemed ‘normal’ in society outside, it
is not, perhaps, unreasonable for him to conclude that ‘a lot of people…would do
what I did or similar things if they had the money and the time’. Indeed, towards the
end of her ordeal, Miranda declares: ‘He becomes the norm’.
44
Now consider such issues in Murdoch’s novel. Is Effingham’s attitude towards

Hannah anything like Clegg’s towards Miranda? How far are there parallels between
the behaviour of Clegg on the one hand and Scottow and Hannah’s husband, on the
other, toward their respective captives?
Much of the horror of The Collector, then, derives from the reader’s increasing sense
that Clegg is a representative rather than ‘perverse’ member of society. The
contradictions in his treatment of Miranda correspond to those evident in wider
society. The novel most clearly brings this out by creating a distinct series of more or
less explicit parallels between Clegg and Miranda’s ‘ideal’ man, G.P., who at one
point in the narrative is likened to Jane Austen’s Mr Knightley, ‘a man in a million’.
Thus G.P., like Clegg, deprives Miranda of liberty in a number of important ways.
Twice she describes him as like G.B. Shaw’s Professor Higgins in Pygmalion without
ever fully grasping the implications of G.P.’s desire, like Clegg, to fashion her,
Pygmalion-like, to his own idea of what a woman should be. G.P.’s success in this
respect can be gauged by the number of times Miranda rehearses his opinions. For
instance, when she comments on the state of contemporary England, she is honest
enough to admit ‘these are all G.P.’s words and ideas’.
Does the reader share Miranda’s estimation of G.P.? If not, why not? Does Miranda
come to ‘see through’ G.P. by the end of her ordeal? Are there parallels to be drawn
in the relationship between Marion Taylor and her male mentors?
Miranda’s autonomy is limited in other ways by G.P. Like Clegg’s, his domineering
behaviour contributes to Miranda’s passivity. On one of the few occasions when
Miranda does draw analogies between G.P. and Clegg, she comments thus: ‘But I’m
not being to the full at all. I’m just sitting and watching. Not only here. With G.P’. As
with Clegg, G.P.’s power over Miranda is partly a function of his success in isolating
her. He is characteristically extremely rude and unwelcoming to her friends. At
moments G.P.’s desire for dominance lapses into mental sadism of a kind Clegg is
never capable of. He is crushingly insensitive about Miranda’s artistic efforts when
she first offers them for his inspection: ‘It was as if he had turned and hit me with his
fist, I couldn’t hide it’. He responds to her disappointment with his customary brutal
flippancy: ‘Have a tragic love affaire. Have your ovaries cut out. Something’.
Examine the kind of views G.P. expresses about women. To what extent are they
comparable to those of Clegg?
Two other links between the supposedly ‘ideal’ G.P. and the ‘perverse’ Clegg are
worth noting. First of all, of course, G.P. is another ‘collector’. Women have the same
function in his life as butterflies do in Clegg’s. He boasts to Miranda:
I’ve met dozens of women and girls like you. Some I’ve known well, some I’ve
seduced against their better nature, two I’ve even married. Some I’ve hardly known at
all, just stood beside them at an exhibition, in the Tube, wherever.
As with Clegg, there is also an undercurrent of ‘perverse’ desire in his attitude to
Miranda: ‘You’re just the daughter I’d like to have. That’s probably why I’ve wanted
you so much these last few months’. Such evidence again stresses the convergence
between G.P. and Clegg. At one moment Miranda writes:
He shocked me, bullied me, taunted me – never in nasty ways. Obliquely. He didn’t
ever force me in any way.
While she is in fact referring to G.P., this could just as well be a description of Clegg.
45
The Novel
To what extent can Murdoch’s novel be described as a ‘feminist’ text? Are there
significant differences between her conception of gender politics and those of
Fowles? Deborah Johnson has deplored Murdoch’s ‘often explicit assumption of
“masculinist” perspectives and values, and its curious reluctance to deal directly or
non-ironically with women’s experience’. On the evidence of this text, do you think
that such criticisms are justified?
Class issues
Further points of comparison between The Collector and The Unicorn include their
interest in questions of class and their intensely self-conscious citation of, and allusion
to, other, earlier literary texts. These interests coincide in the attention which each text
pays to the role of ‘high’ culture in constructing social identities in modern societies.
The Collector explicitly explores the way in which ‘high’ culture is a field of conflict
articulating wider class tensions. As you will no doubt have noticed, the text draws
heavily, if at times ironically, on Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Despite his assumption of the name Ferdinand, Clegg is, of course, far closer to the
disadvantaged subject-position of Caliban. In Shakespeare’s text, Prospero and
Miranda attempt to educate, or acculturate, their unfortunate host, before imprisoning
him. In Fowles’ text, Miranda’s attempts to ‘correct’ and develop Clegg’s aesthetic
taste are expressive of her broader hostility to the somewhat indeterminate class to
which Clegg’s windfall affiliates him. She even uses the rhetoric of World War Two,
describing herself as one of ‘the Few’, defending a tradition of ‘breeding’ and ‘high’
culture against the barbarians represented by Clegg. In the end, she loses confidence,
asserting that ‘there’s nothing to hold back the New People, they’ll grow stronger and
stronger and swamp us’.
How does Miranda’s expression of such views affect the way we see her? To what
extent can Clegg be seen as a kind of Caliban, and therefore as a disadvantaged
individual, even a victim? Identify the other, more personal, circumstances in his life
which make him seem like a victim. What is the cultural/political significance of such
reversals in his status within the moral scheme of the novel?
Miranda’s attempt to provide Clegg with an aesthetic education is founded on the

delusion that access to the ‘right’ kind of culture will liberate him from the destructive
attitudes to women that have led to her imprisonment. Much modern Gothic is
sceptical that any distinction can be drawn between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture in this
respect. This raises serious doubts about the status and function of ‘high’ culture, and
a blurring of boundaries between culture and politics, which is symptomatic of the
decade in which these texts were written more generally.
Now consider class issues in Murdoch’s novel. What is the relationship of Dennis
Nolan to Hannah? What is the significance of his and Gerald’s class origin? How
does awareness of these facts affect our attitude to Hannah? How are gender relations
in the narratives which are cited in Murdoch’s novel characterised? Is their effect
beneficial on those who consume them, like Effingham?

While we have concentrated on The Collector and The Unicorn in this chapter of the
subject guide, you need not feel obliged to stay with these texts. You can adapt the
material above in a number of different ways. If you want to work up an author,
instead of a genre study based around modern Gothic, you could read Fowles’ The
Magus (1966), or Murdoch’s A Severed Head (1961) or The Italian Girl (1964) which
46
are also all modern Gothic novels. You might want to study other modern Gothic
writers – for example, Angela Carter, Muriel Spark, Jean Rhys, Emma Tennant or Fay
Weldon.
A selection of such texts might include Carter’s The Magic Toyshop (1969) or The
Passion of New Eve (1975); Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) or The
Driver’s Seat (1970); Tennant’s The Bad Sister (1975) or Wild Nights (1979);
Weldon’s Praxis (1978) or The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1982); Jean Rhys’s
Wide Sargasso Sea (1966); David Storey’s Radcliffe (1963).If you are interested in the
historical development of Gothic, you might want to compare an example of modern
Gothic with an example of Romantic or Victorian Gothic – for instance, M.G. Lewis’s
The Monk (1796) or Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847),
Learning outcomes
By the end of this chapter, having studied the essential reading and some of the
associated critical texts which have been recommended, you should be able to:
• discuss the conventions and thematic preoccupations of modern Gothic
• compare modern variants of Gothic with earlier phases of the genre
• answer the sample essay questions with reasonable confidence and see how such
a topic study might form part of your larger course of study to ensure successful
preparation for the examination.

You are unlikely to get questions in the examination specifically on modern Gothic;
see the sample examination paper at the end of this subject guide for a clearer idea of
how you would have to adapt your knowledge of Gothic to answer examination
questions.
1. In what ways and to what effect does the contemporary novel borrow from
popular culture?
2. Taking two novels of your own choice, attempt a definition of the characteristics
of modern Gothic.
3. ‘Modern Gothic derives its effects from disturbing received conceptions of
normality and perversity.’ Discuss in relation to two novels.
4. In what ways does contemporary Gothic both recycle and challenge the
conventions and assumptions of earlier phases of the genre?
47
The Novel
Notes
48
Chapter 4: Section B topic study: post-modernism
Chapter 4
Section B topic study:

1
Remember that you must
answer on at least two texts by
post-modernism1
different authors for Section B
questions.
Essential reading
In order to provide a comparative perspective on different post-modernist styles, while
maintaining a manageable field of study, in this chapter we will focus on:
Don Delillo’s White Noise. (London: Picador, 1985) [ISBN 0-330-29109-2; 0-330-
29108-4].
Paul Auster’s City of Glass. Book One of The New York Trilogy. (London: Faber and
Faber, 1987) [ISBN 0-571-15223-6].
But some of the other novels you might wish to focus on include:
• Italo Calvino If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller

• Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49
• Angela Carter Nights at the Circus
• Robert Coover Pricksongs and Descants
• William Gibson Neuromancer
• Philip Roth The Counterlife.

On DeLillo
LeClair, Tom In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. (Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 1987) [ISBN 0252014839].
Lentricchia, Frank (ed.) Introducing Don DeLillo. (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1991) [ISBN 0822311445; 0822311356]. The essays by John McClure and
Eugene Goodheart are especially worthwhile.
Lentricchia, Frank (ed.) New Essays on White Noise. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991) [ISBN 0-521-39893-2 (pbk); 0-521-39291-8 (hbk)].
On Auster
Borone, Dennis (ed.) Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster.
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995)
[ISBN 0812215567 (pbk); 0812233174 (hbk)].
On post-modernism
Annesley, James Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary

American Novel. (London: Pluto, 1998) [ISBN 0745310907 (pbk); 0745310915].
A very readable and insightful examination of the theme of consumption in
contemporary fiction.
Barth, John ‘The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction’, Atlantic
245(1):65–71.
Baudrillard, Jean Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip
Beitchman. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983) [ISBN 0936756020]. The best
introduction to Baudrillard’s writing.
49
The Novel
Brooker, Peter (ed.) Modernism/Postmodernism. (London and New York: Longman,

1992) [ISBN 0-582-06358-2 (hbk); 0-582-06357-4 (pbk)]. A strong selection of
essays that illuminate the key differences and similarities between modernism
and post-modernism.
Cohen, Josh Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing and the Politics
of Seeing. (London: Pluto, 1998) [ISBN 0745312071 (pbk); 0745312128]. A
theoretically informed treatment of post-modernism, focused on the relationship
between writing and visual culture.
Connor, Stephen Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the
Contemporary. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1997) [ISBN 0-631-20052-5]. A very
good general introduction.
Foster, Hal (ed.) Postmodern Culture. (aka The Anti-Aesthetic.) (London and Sidney:
Pluto, 1985) [ISBN 0745300030]. An excellent collection featuring many brief
but seminal analyses of post-modernism.
Graff, Gerald ‘The Myth of The Postmodernist Breakthrough’ in Literature Against
Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society. (New York: Ivan R. Dee, 1995)
[ISBN 1566630975]. Forceful refutation of the very distinction between
modernism and post-modernism – a useful counterpoint to the other texts.
Harvey, David The Condition of Postmodernity. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989)
[ISBN 0-631-16294-1 (pbk); 0-631-16294-1; 0-631-16292-5]. A superb, very
expansive analysis of post-modern culture, taking in historical, economic,
geographical and sociological perspectives.
Hassan, Ihab The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture. (Ohio
State University Press, 1987) [ISBN 0814204287 (pbk); 0814204198 (hbk)].
Hutcheon, Linda The Politics of Postmodernism. (London and New York: Routledge,
1989) [ISBN 0-415-03992-4 (pbk); 0-415-03991-6].
Hutcheon, Linda Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. (Methuen, 1984)
[ISBN 0-416-37140-X (pbk)]. On ‘self-reflexive’ or ‘meta’ fiction.
Huyssen, Andreas After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and
Postmodernism. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986)
[ISBN 0-333-45533-9 (pbk); 0-333-45532-0 (hbk)]. A fascinating treatment of the
transition from modern to post-modern culture in terms of the rise of mass culture.
Jameson, Fredric Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
(London: Verso, 1991) [ISBN 0860915379 (pbk); 0860913147]. A demanding but
seminal analysis of post-modern culture in terms of the development of
multinational capitalism.
Kroker, Arthur and David Cook The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and
Hyperaesthetics. (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988)
[ISBN 0-333-46180-0 (pbk); 0-333-46179-7 (hbk)]. Focuses on idea of hyper-
reality – some may find it a little too delirious!
Lyotard, Jean-François The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
(Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) [ISBN 0816611734 (pbk);
0816611661 (hbk)]. Very worthwhile for those who want to probe more deeply
into the subject.
McCaffrey, Brian (ed.) Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-bibliographic Guide. (New York:
Greenwood Press, 1986). A very useful pointer to other writings and interesting
essays on the subject.
McHale, Brian Postmodernist Fiction. (London: Routledge, 1989)
[ISBN 0-415-04513-4].
McHale, Brian Constructing Postmodernism. (London and New York: Routledge,
1992) [ISBN 0-415-06014-1 (pbk); 0-415-06013-3 (hbk)]. The author covers
broad cultural field of post-modernism.
50
Pfeil, Fred Another Tale to Tell: Politics and Narrative in Postmodern Culture.
(London: Verso, 1990) [ISBN 0860919927 (pbk); 0860912779 (hbk)]. A diverse
and entertaining collection of essays.
Ross, Andrew (ed.) Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism. (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1993) [ISBN 0852246544; 0852246471].
Wilde, Alan Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism and the Ironic
Imagination. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) [ISBN
0801824494]. A useful discussion of post-modern irony.
Introduction
The aim of this chapter is to introduce and explain some of the key concepts in post-
modernist theory and cultural practice, and to demonstrate their relevance to an
understanding of developments in the contemporary novel.
Post-modernism: problems of definition

The terms ‘post-modern’ and ‘post-modernism’ have become part of the mainstream
language of our culture, employed frequently by radio, TV and print media
commentators, usually with a great deal of imprecision. Far from clarifying the term,
this overusage seems to have succeeded only in rendering it yet more obscure and
confusing.
This chapter will try to make some sense of this term, first of all by pointing to the
many different ideas and practices associated with it – for one of the only points of
consensus among those who have attempted to define post-modernism is how difficult
it is to define! There are so many competing versions of post-modernism, generated
by disciplines as diverse as literature, philosophy, architecture, history and sociology,
that a single and authoritative account of it is impossible. More to the point, we shall
see that any such account, for most theorists of post-modernism, is undesirable; for if
there is anything that can be said to characterise the post-modern sensibility, it may be
a resistance to fixed definitions and externally imposed dogmas.
Nevertheless, if we are to attain some insight into the post-modern, it is worth
beginning by making a distinction between two different usages of the term, the one
descriptive, the other prescriptive. For some commentators, ‘post-modernism’ has
been useful as a term primarily as a way of describing and accounting for the many
different social, cultural, political and economic transformations that have occurred in
recent years.
If the phrase ‘recent years’ seems a little vague, it is because yet another dispute
among theorists centres on when post-modernism started. Although most theorists
date the ‘post-modern turn’ somewhere about the 60s, others, such as Dale Carter,
identify the emergence of the Cold War (i.e. after World War Two), when America
and the West transformed into ‘consumer societies’, as the beginning of the period.
Others still, such as Frank Kermode and Gerald Graff, deny the very term ‘post-
modernist’ itself, insisting that ‘modernism’ never ended!
What is it, if anything, that you think distinguishes the culture of the late twentieth
century from previous cultures? Is it the dominance of consumerism and mass
culture? A scepticism about grand political projects such as communism? Is it the
economic and technological interconnectedness of different parts of the world? Or is
it the instability of cultural, social and sexual identities? Look at the novels under
discussion and identify which of these features they most clearly place in the
foreground.
51
The Novel
Others, especially contemporary French thinkers, have taken up the term not merely
for the purpose of neutral historical description, but as a means of developing a
distinct philosophical attitude appropriate to the fragmented and accelerated consumer
society of the late twentieth century.
It’s worth noting from the outset that the ‘descriptive’ and ‘prescriptive’ approaches
to post-modernism set out below are by no means mutually exclusive. A descriptive
account such as Jameson’s will have clear implications as to how the culture of the
future should work, while a prescriptive version like Lyotard’s will be grounded in a
specific set of social and historical observations.
Describing post-modernism: Harvey and

Jameson
We’ll begin by examining the descriptive, historical account of the post-modern,
associated with thinkers such as David Harvey and Fredric Jameson, as well as
Andreas Huyssen, Linda Hutcheon and Brian McHale. We will then see how some of
the phenomena associated with post-modernity are dramatised in Don DeLillo’s novel
White Noise. This will be followed by a summary of Lyotard’s prescriptive model of
post-modernism, illustrated by Paul Auster’s City of Glass.
Each of the writers cited above highlights different aspects of the culture of post-
modernity. We’ll discuss Harvey and Jameson below; for further reading, however,
Huyssen’s After the Great Divide provides a cultural–historical approach to post-
modernism, emphasising the importance of gender and mass culture to the emergence
of a post-modern culture. Hutcheon’s two texts, The Poetics of Postmodernism and
The Politics of Postmodernism, provide good overviews of the diverse fields of
contemporary culture, whereas McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction concentrates on
literature, and so may ultimately be the most useful for students of English.
David Harvey identifies the roots of the ‘post-modern condition’ in a series of major
economic shifts that took place during the early 70s. With the collapse of the Bretton
Woods agreement (which fixed the price of gold and the convertibility of the dollar)
in 1971, and the Oil Crisis of 1973, came the new global economic regime of ‘flexible
accumulation’. The relatively regulated, state-managed economy that had prevailed in
the West up to this point gave way to one characterised by perpetual flux in labour
markets, a new diversity and instability in patterns of production and consumption,
and constant technological innovation. Harvey, employing an essentially Marxist
methodology, argues that these economic shifts produced parallel cultural shifts,
whereby the ‘relatively stable aesthetic’ of the modernist period is succeeded by ‘a
post-modern aesthetic that celebrates difference, ephemerality, spectacle and the
commodification of cultural forms’.
Identifying similar changes in the global economy, Jameson’s work on post-
modernism offers a more expansive account of the new cultural forms to which those
changes gave rise. The unstable, fractured world of multinational capitalism, he
argues, has given rise to a number of tendencies in contemporary cultural life. These
include what he calls ‘the waning of affect’, by which he means the loss of any real
emotional or psychological investment in the work of art by the artist. Compare, for
example, a modernist text such as Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with a
post-modern text like Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero. Joyce’s deeply personal
exploration of the anxiety and alienation of the young Stephen Daedalus contrasts
starkly with the flat, disinterested and amoral tone of Ellis’s narrator Troy. It is as if
52
the post-modern sensibility is too disaffected to express authentic human emotion and
experience, producing a literary style that critic James Annesley has described as
‘blank’.
A further, related, feature of post-modern culture identified by Jameson is what he
calls a tendency to ‘pastiche’ – the imitation of ‘dead’ or redundant literary,
architectural, filmic or other styles, not for the sake of parodying them, which would
imply a specific moral or political intent, but simply to celebrate the diversity of styles
for their own sake. Post-modernism refuses to privilege the style of any one period –
whether Classical, Romantic or Modern – as the ultimate and authoritative one. Jeff
Noon’s recent novel, Automated Alice, which acutely imitates Lewis Carroll’s style to
tell a third, ‘cyberpunk’ Alice story, illustrates this tendency very clearly, fusing as it
does Carroll’s Victorian style with a distinctly 1990s’ sensibility.
Finally, Jameson speaks of the ‘derealisation’ of the world in post-modernist culture,
the constant blurring of the boundaries between reality and fantasy. His example is
Disneyland, both a ‘real’ and a ‘fictional’ space. Examples of ‘derealisation’ abound in
post-modern fiction, for example in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, whose first
sentence describes the sky as ‘the colour of television tuned to a dead channel’. What
Gibson achieves through such a description is the confusion of ‘nature’, or reality (the
sky), with ‘culture’, or unreality (television), pointing to the ways in which the media
have penetrated everyday life to such an extent that they are now an inextricable part
of our reality.
This last point has been taken up with particular force by the French cultural theorist
Jean Baudrillard. In post-modern culture, Baudrillard argues, cultural products ‘are
conceived from the point of view of their own reproducibility’, by which he means
that today’s mass cultural objects have never existed other than as copies, or what he
terms ‘simulations’.
Try to locate some examples within contemporary culture of what Baudrillard means
by ‘simulations’. What would it mean, for instance, to speak of the ‘original’ Mickey
Mouse or the ‘original’ Big Mac?
This concept of simulation, as we will now see, is particularly central to our first
illustrative text, White Noise.
White Noise: the simulated culture of post-

modernity
White Noise is narrated by Jack Gladney, a professor of ‘Hitler Studies’ at a small
American campus university. The novel recounts a series of encounters with death and
disaster experienced by Jack and his family. In the first part of the novel, we are
introduced to Jack’s family and friends, specifically to their experiences with, and
ideas about, the television, shopping malls, supermarkets and college that make up life
in the small town of Blacksmith. Taken together, these spaces form an illuminating
picture of post-modern American culture.
Early on in the novel, Jack and his friend, Murray Jay Siskind, a visiting professor
with a special interest in ‘Elvis Studies’, visit a tourist attraction near Blacksmith
known as ‘The Most Photographed Barn in America’. The incident establishes one of
the novel’s most insistent preoccupations: the ‘derealisation’ of experience described
by Jameson. The barn is deemed worth visiting not for any notable historical or
architectural features, but simply because it is ‘most photographed’. In other words,
it’s not the barn in itself that gives it meaning, but the camera-snapping tourists that
53
The Novel
surround it. Murray suggests that it is impossible to ‘see’ the barn except through its
mediation by the cameras: ‘Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes
impossible to see the barn’.
In the second part of the novel, Jack and his family are forced to evacuate Blacksmith
because of a toxic chemical cloud, named ‘The Airborne Toxic Event’ by the media,
floating over the town. Again, the event takes on meaning only through its
representation by the media, a point comically illustrated by the responses of Jack’s
daughter and stepdaughter, Denise and Steffie, to the radio reports. The girls develop
the ‘symptoms’ of exposure to the cloud only after the radio announces what those
symptoms are. Thus, when they begin to develop sweaty palms after the relevant
announcement, Jack’s son Heinrich informs his stepmother Babette that ‘There’s been
a correction…They ought to be throwing up’.
What is it that DeLillo is trying to convey about the nature of reality in contemporary
culture and society through these incidents? Try to locate other incidents of the novel
that expose a gap between appearance and reality. Do you feel that DeLillo is critical
of society’s increasing ‘derealisation’? Does he find anything in this tendency to
celebrate?
In particular, examine the effect of simulated culture on the family. What kind of a
family are the Gladneys? In what ways do they conform to the stereotypical
American nuclear family, and in what ways do they differ from it?
Despite the comedy, DeLillo’s point is profoundly serious. He is suggesting that even
a momentous and terrible event such as a chemical disaster can be stripped of any
meaningful reality by the mass media and technology. In the final part of the novel,
Jack becomes embroiled in a plot sparked by his wife’s secret consumption of an
experimental drug named Dylar, which claims to ward off the fear of death. Babette’s
need for Dylar implies that in a culture in which every aspect of life, from food to the
family, is simulated, the ultimate ‘authentic’ experience, death, becomes too terrifying
to contemplate.
Why do you think DeLillo is so preoccupied with death in White Noise? Why does
the thought of death so insistently disturb his central characters? What does he seem
to be suggesting about our relationship to death and dying in a ‘simulated’ culture?
DeLillo’s novel, then, very acutely dramatises the experience of post-modern culture.
Unlike the novel we’ll discuss below, City of Glass, it is not especially experimental
in form – one might say it is a novel ‘about’ post-modernity rather than a post-
modernist novel, exploring post-modern themes without necessarily expressing a post-
modernist sensibility. Nonetheless, the element of pastiche that Jameson identifies is
clearly present in the novel, in its ironic employment of mass cultural genres. Part
One reads like a family sitcom (like the ‘Brady Bunch’ , the Gladneys are not an
‘organic’ family – of the four children, only one belongs to both parents), Part Two
like a disaster movie and Part Three like a thriller.
How do the novels you have read compare with other post-modern cultural products?
Watch the Coen Brothers’ movies, some of the finest examples of post-modernist
pastiche; look at Andy Warhol’s silkscreen portraits and Bruce Nauman’s neon
installations, which illustrate very clearly the idea of the ‘waning of affect’; and try to
find a photograph of John Portman’s Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, which
Jameson regards as the exemplary post-modern building. Which aspects of narrative
and imagery in these cultural forms can be identified in DeLillo and Auster?
54
Prescribing post-modernism: Lyotard

We now come to Jean-François Lyotard’s philosophy of post-modernism, which he
sets out in his book The Postmodern Condition. Lyotard’s argument can be summed
up by his description of the prevailing attitude of contemporary society as being one
of ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’. By this rather daunting phrase, he means that
we no longer believe in grand ideological projects that claim they can resolve all
human problems and create a utopia.
How do the novels you have read undermine the idea that tensions and contradictions
in society can be ‘resolved’? To what extent can the Dylar narrative in White Noise
and the story of Peter Stillman’s experiment on his son in City of Glass be seen as
implicit critiques of utopian thinking?
The major political systems, or ‘metanarratives’ of ‘modernity’, fascism, communism

and global capitalism, all impose one model of ethics, politics and society on
individuals. History, and most obviously the Nazi Holocaust, shows that such imposed
systems can wreak unspeakable horror. In contrast to the modernist illusion that all
conflicts can be resolved by a single system, Lyotard argues for a world of ‘small’, or
micro-narratives, ideas and activities coexisting not in absolute harmony but in
creative tension. Against the assumption that all thought and action can be driven in a
single direction, he suggests they can take many paths from many different groups
and individuals.
Both the French theorists discussed in this chapter, Baudrillard and Lyotard, are
complex and demanding writers. If you want to find out more about them, it may be
worth reading an introductory text first: Bill Readings’ Understanding Lyotard and
Douglas Kellner’s Jean Baudrillard are both recommended. If you’re more ambitious
and want to read the writers themselves, start with Baudrillard’s short volume,
Simulations, and Lyotard’s The Postmodern Explained to Children.
Lyotard’s argument for social and political diversity, in which a plurality of social
voices can coexist creatively even when in conflict, can be seen at work in a different
form in a number of post-modernist literary texts. From the French nouveau roman of
the 1960s (Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras) to the playful work
of Italians Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, to experimental American writers John
Barth, Donalde Barthelme and Robert Coover, literature in the last few decades has
rejected the idea of a single, authoritative narrative voice (or ‘metanarrative’) that can
organise and ‘explain’ the events recounted.
Where a classic realist such as Dickens imposes the authority of his own narrative
voice on the diverse range of characters and attitudes in his novels, giving them a
certain ideological and moral coherence, the narrators of post-modern novels are
typically unreliable, unstable, multiple or a combination of the three. Even James
Joyce’s great experimental work, Ulysses, despite its celebration of a plurality of
different speech registers and literary styles, ultimately imposes a unifying mythic
pattern on that plurality.
A central feature of post-modern fiction, which arises out of its distrust of narrative
authority, is what is called ‘self-reflexivity’, or ‘metafiction’, in which the author
shatters the storytelling illusion by being self-conscious about how the text we are
reading is written. In so doing, he or she unmasks the ‘realism’ of the traditional novel
as an illusion. As we’ll now see, City of Glass illustrates this tendency very clearly.
55
The Novel
What other examples of ‘self-reflexivity’ can you identify in contemporary literature

and culture? Can you think of instances of self-consciousness in recent films or
television programmes, for example? What effect does such self-consciousness have
on our reading or viewing of the text? Does it simply intrude upon the ‘straight’ telling
of a story, or does it make the story more interesting and unpredictable to read?
City of Glass: post-modernism and metafiction

City of Glass is a classic example of the post-modernist approach to narrative, raising
questions about its own status as a text and about the nature of authorship. It questions
the very possibility of narrative realism, ingeniously undercutting the illusion of a
reliable narrator through its self-reflexive strategies. The first book in Auster’s New
York Trilogy, it is a pastiche of the detective story, which subverts the conventions of
the crime genre by failing to resolve the web of events in a neatly resolved pattern.
At the start of the novel the central character, Daniel Quinn, a detective writer whose
wife has died, is phoned in the middle of the night by an unknown person asking for
‘The Paul Auster Detective Agency’. Initially he informs the caller that he has the
wrong number. However, when the same caller rings and asks for Auster again, he
replies, ‘This is Auster speaking’, a decision that leads him to assume the role of
detective in a strange and elaborate case. Quinn/Auster’s brief is to find and tail the
father of his employer, Peter Stillman. Stillman is the victim of an experiment
performed on him by his philosopher father, who locked his son in a room throughout
his childhood in order to test an obscure theological thesis about the ‘original’, ‘pure’
language of God.
During the course of the novel, Quinn tracks down and visits the ‘real’ Paul Auster
and tells him of the events that have taken place. ‘Auster’ turns out to be a writer
whose biography very closely resembles that of the Auster we know to be the author
of City of Glass! However, ‘Auster’ the character claims to know nothing of the
Stillman case and, when told by Quinn of what has happened, remarks, ‘If I had been
in your place, I probably would have done the same thing’.
How does the encounter between Quinn and ‘Auster’ illustrate the strategy of
metafictional play? Consider how, by relegating himself to the status of a minor
character in his own text, at the mercy of contingency, chance and randomness,
Auster undermines the traditional conception of the author as the invisible but all-
knowing ‘God-like’ force at the centre of the book. What is the novel suggesting
about the relationship between ‘authorship’ and authority or control?
The novel’s plot plays consistently with the ideas of contingency and chance. Waiting
in secret for the elder Stillman at Grand Central Station, Quinn spots him coming off
a train, only to find seconds later that a second man is walking directly behind the
first, ‘his face the exact twin of Stillman’s’. Quinn finally decides to follow the ‘first’
Stillman, but the arbitrariness of this decision offers a sly self-reflexive comment on
the arbitrariness of the novelist’s choices. Auster demonstrates that at every point, the
novelist is forced to carry his story at random in one direction rather than another, so
that every actual plot is haunted by the ‘ghosts’ of other, unrealised plots.
The elder Stillman’s curious ideas about, and experiments with, language further
explore the theme of contingency. Stillman finds that the existing form of human
language is inadequate because it is imprecise. For example, we continue to call a
broken umbrella an umbrella, even though ‘“it can no longer perform its function”
and has therefore “ceased to be an umbrella”’. Stillman’s project is to iron this
imprecision out of language, to make our words ‘at last say what we have to say’.
56
This is his apparent motivation for isolating his son from the world for his first nine
years; he believes that, cut off from the world’s corrupting influence, the boy will
speak the perfect, uncorrupted language of God. In fact, however, the experiment
fails, and the boy grows up to speak incomprehensible gibberish such as ‘Wimble
click crumblechaw beloo’. The attempt to remove indeterminacy from language, to
put ourselves in absolute control of our words, Auster implies, is doomed to fail. In
Lyotard’s terms, we might say that the attempt to impose a single, authoritative ‘meta-
narrative’ on the inherent diversity and complexity of language will inevitably
collapse.
You may find it useful to compare City of Glass with a more traditional detective
story such as Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. What are the central differences
between the two authors’ approaches to the genre? How do the methods of
Chandler’s detective, Marlowe, compare with those of Quinn? By responding to these
questions, you should glean some instructive insights into the differences between
traditional-realist and post-modernist fiction.

After studying the aspects of post-modernism covered in this chapter of the subject
guide, you may wish to go on to study other topics that might overlap with post-
modernism and could be applied to other questions of section B of the examination.
The following list is by no means exhaustive:
• gender and post-modernism
• race and post-modernism
• genre and post-modernism.
Learning outcomes
By the end of this chapter and having read the recommended primary texts and
associated critical material, you should:
• be able to discuss what is involved in the concept ‘post-modernism’
• have some sense of the debate over the term and the complexities involved, as
well as where to read more about it
• have a grasp of how post-modernism has helped to shape contemporary literature
at the levels of both theme and form, as well as their interrelation.

1. Compare and contrast the use of post-modernist fictional strategies in the work of
two authors of your choice.
2. In what ways does post-modernist fiction undermine conventional realist
conceptions of plot and character? Discuss with reference to at least two novels
by different authors.
3. Explain how writings in other disciplines, such as geography, architecture, film
studies, art history and so on, may prove useful in studying post-modernist
fiction. You must focus on at least two novels by different authors.
4. How does post-modern fiction treat the theme of consumer culture and its social
and personal effects? Discuss in relation to at least two authors.
57
The Novel
Notes
58
Appendix: Sample examination paper
Appendix
Sample examination paper

Answer three questions, choosing at least one from each section. Candidates may
not discuss the same text more than once, in this examination or in any other
Advanced level unit examination.
Section A
1. ‘In what you are writing you have only to make use of imitation and the more
perfect the imitation the better your writing will be.’ (MIGUEL DE CERVANTES,
Don Quixote) Discuss this quotation with reference to one novelist you have
studied.
2. ‘The total subordination of the plot to the pattern of the autobiographical memoir
is a defiant assertion of the primacy of individual experience.’ Discuss, with
reference to one novelist you have read.
3. ‘I have dropped the curtain over this scene for a minute, to remind you of one
thing, and to inform you of another.’ (LAURENCE STERNE, The Life and
Opinions of Tristram Shandy) Discuss the significance of intrusive narrators in the
work of one novelist you have read.
4. ‘It is truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good
fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ (JANE AUSTEN, Pride and Prejudice)
Discuss the significance of irony in one author you have studied.
5. ‘We novelists are the examining magistrates of men and their passions.’ (EMILE
ZOLA) Discuss how one novelist you have studied uses their work to examine
social problems.
6. ‘What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the
illustration of character?’ (HENRY JAMES) Discuss the relationship between
character and incident in the work of one novelist you have studied.
7. Discuss the significance of one of the following in the work of one novelist you
have studied: embedded narratives, dialogue, letters, allusions to other novels.
8. ‘Every novel worthy of the name is like another planet, whether large or small,
which has its own laws just as it has its own flora and fauna.’ Discuss this
statement with reference to the work of one novelist you have studied.
9. ‘The novel begins in a railway station…a cloud of smoke hides the first part of the
paragraph.’ (ITALO CALVINO, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller) Discuss the
significance of narrational self-consciousness in the work of one novelist you have
studied.
10. Discuss the significance of endings in the work of one novelist you have studied.
Section B
Answers in this section must refer to the work of at least two different writers.
11. Explain how the formal innovations of any two or more novelists you have
studied had a significant impact on the form as a whole.
12. With reference to two or more writers, discuss how the social and economic
conditions of the eighteenth century affected the rise of the novel.
13. Discuss the treatment of one of the following themes in at least two novelists you
have studied: forbidden love, alienation, murder, childhood, the double.
59
The Novel
14. ‘I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say
upon woman’s inconstancy…But perhaps you will say, these were all written by
men.’ (JANE AUSTEN, Captain Harville in Persuasion) Discuss the contribution
of at least two woman novelists from the eighteenth or nineteenth century to the
art of fiction.
15. ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’
(LEO TOLSTOY, Anna Karenina) Discuss the role of tragedy with reference to at
least two novelists you have studied.
16. With reference to the work of two or more novelists you have studied, discuss
what is distinctive about the representation of subjectivity in ‘modernist’ or ‘post-
modernist’ novels.
17. Discuss the significance of either satire or parody with reference to two or more
novelists you have studied.
18. ‘Genre conventions establish a kind of contract between the text and the reader, so
that some expectations are rendered plausible, others ruled out, and elements
which would seem strange in another context are made intelligible with the genre.’
Discuss this statement with reference to two or more novelists you have studied.
19. Curricula for the study of the novel are often organised chronologically. Explain
how a different system of organisation might be productive with reference to two
or more novelists you have studied.
20. Discuss the contribution to the novel form of two or more novelists who are of
neither European nor American origin.
60
Notes
Notes
61
The Novel
Notes
62
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The Novel

J. Cohen, J. Desmarais, B. Moore-Gilbert

The External System

Published by: University of London Press

033E070 The Novel

December 2008: First correction

Students should note the following examiners’ changes for the

033E070 The novel

Sensation, genre, mystery and melodrama ............................................................35

Suggested primary reading

• François Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1534).

• J.M. Coetzee The Life and Times of Michael K (1983).

Other recommended books

Suggested study syllabus

Study questions and recommended secondary

2. ‘Romances are generally composed of the constant Loves and invincible

Genre and sub-genre

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination, Four Essays.

Narrative technique and theory: character

Narrative voice and perspective

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction.

Narrative structure and chronology

Gennette, Gérard Narrative Discourse, an Essay in Method.

Realism and mimesis

Auerbach, Erich Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature.

Alter, Robert Partial Magic: The Novel as Self-Conscious Genre.

Modernist and postmodernist fiction

Barth, John ‘The Literature of Replenishment’ in Hoffman and Murphy (eds)

The role of the reader

Eco, Umberto The Role of the Reader.

Using this subject guide

Preparing for the examination

Section A author study:

Jane Austen Mansfield Park. Edited by James Kinsley with an introduction by

Recommended secondary reading on Austen

Lodge, David ‘Composition, Distribution, Arrangement; Form and Structure in Jane

The debate on Austen

Austen and the novel

deploying familiar narrative techniques in new ways. Similarly, Austen’s handling of a

In order to gain a sense of Austen’s relation to eighteenth-century novel traditions,

Mansfield Park: the rhetoric of realism

If Rushworth’s name suggests his precipitous and ill-considered judgement of ‘worth’,

Chapter X, with its clearly symbolic handling of location, is to some extent an

Persuasion: subjectivity and narrative voice

For a number of complex reasons, many of them ideological, Austen’s novels

Nevertheless, you might pursue your reading of Persuasion further so as to clarify a

Suggestions for further study

Sample essay questions

Section A author study: Honoré

Recommended secondary reading

*Saxton, Arnold Honoré de Balzac: Eugénie Grandet. (Harmondsworth: Penguin

*Auerbach, Eric Mimesis. Translated by W. Trask. (Princeton : Princeton University

• France becomes a constitutional monarchy (3 September 1791).

The Human Comedy cycle

Consider the implications of Balzac’s adoption of a taxonomical (that is,

Sensation, genre, mystery and melodrama

Parents and children

transparent narrative voice. Instead, he exercises an authority in his novels, urging us

Sample essay questions

Section B topic study: modern

Recommended secondary reading

Sage, Victor Modern Gothic: A Reader. (Manchester: Manchester University Press,