The novel is modernism's most vital and experimental genre. In this 2007 Companion leading critics explore the very significant pleasures of reading modernist novels, but also demonstrate how and why reading modernist fiction can be difficult. No one technique or style defines a novel as modernist. Instead, these essays explain the formal innovations, stylistic preferences and thematic concerns which unite modernist fiction. They also show how modernist novels relate to other forms of art, and to the social and cultural context from which they emerged. Alongside chapters on prominent novelists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, as well as lesser-known authors such as Dorothy Richardson and Djuna Barnes, themes such as genre and geography, time and consciousness are discussed in detail. With a chronology and guide to further reading, this is the most accessible and informative overview of the genre available.
Chronology; Reading the modernist novel: an introduction Morag Shiach; 1. Modernists on the art of fiction Jeff Wallace; 2. Early modernism Peter Brooker; 3. Remembrance and tense past Ann Banfield; 4. Consciousness as a stream Anne Fernihough; 5. The legacies of modernism Laura Marcus; 6. James Joyce and the languages of modernism Katherine Mullin; 7. Tradition and revelation: moments of being in Virginia Woolf's major novels Meg Jensen; 8. Wyndham Lewis and modernist satire Rebecca Beasley; 9. D. H. Lawrence, organicism and the modernist novel Hugh Stevens; 10. Joseph Conrad's half-written fictions Jeremy Hawthorn; 11. Djuna Barnes: melancholic modernism Deborah Parsons; 12. William Faulkner: an impossibly comprehensive expressivity Catherine Gunther Kodat; 13. Writing lives: Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, Gertrude Stein Howard Finn; 14. CLR James, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer: the 'black Atlantic' and the modernist novel Anna Snaith; 15. Situating Samuel Beckett Lois Oppenheim; Further reading.
