Literatura Moderna Si Contemporana de Expresie Engleza - Sem 1 - M. Praisler

Universitatea “Dunărea de Jos” din Galați
Departamentul pentru Învăţământ la Distanţă

şi cu Frecvenţă Redusă
Literatură modernă şi
contemporană de
expresie engleză
Michaela Praisler
Facultatea de Litere
Specializarea:
Limba și literatura română – Limba și literatura engleză
Anul III, Semestrul 1
Objectives
,,Dunarea de Jos’’ University of Galati

Faculty of Letters
MODERNISM AND THE

NOVEL IN ENGLISH
Course tutor:
Professor Michaela Praisler
Galaţi
2022
Contents
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................ 7
Chapter 1
MODERNISM ..................................................................................................................... 8
1.1. Background ............................................................................................................ 8
1.2. Early Modernism (James, Forster, Conrad) ....................................................... 11
1.3. Experimentalism (Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence) ...................................................... 12
Chapter 2
REPRESENTATIVE NAMES AND TITLES ..................................................................... 13
2.1. Henry James ........................................................................................................ 13
2.2. Edward Morgan Forster ....................................................................................... 16
2.3. Joseph Conrad ..................................................................................................... 19
2.4. Virginia Woolf....................................................................................................... 22
2.5. James Joyce ........................................................................................................ 26
2.6. David Herbert Lawrence ...................................................................................... 29
Chapter 3
TESTS ............................................................................................................................. 33
3.1. Test One ............................................................................................................... 33
3.2. Test Two ............................................................................................................... 35
3.3. Test Three ............................................................................................................ 36
3.4. Test Four .............................................................................................................. 38
3.5. Test Five ............................................................................................................... 40
3.6. Test Six ................................................................................................................. 41
REFERENCES ................................................................................................................. 45
GLOSSARY OF LITERARY TERMS ............................................................................... 47
Modernism and the Novel in English 3

Objectives
OBJECTIVES
• Reading literary texts as resonant of culture and civilisation;

• Accepting cultural diversity and multiplicity of worldviews;
• Valorizing personal research potential.
• Aquiring the theoretical knowledge associated with modernism as reflected in

the novel in English;
• Identifying the practices and techniques specific to modernist novel discourse;
• Operating with the concepts, methods and techniques advanced by modernism
in approaching the literary texts selected.
Types of teaching activities
• problematisation
• case study
• heuristic conversation
• debate
Modernism
INTRODUCTION
The course is designed so as to allow form to support content and invite at interactive
approaches to the texts and contexts under focus.
Its main objectives are:

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

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

Modernism
Chapter 1
MODERNISM
1.1. Background
Modernism is the early twentieth century orientation associated with
the idea of the avant-garde, of innovation and experimentation, but also
with that of anti-realism, individualism and intellectualism.
Within the modernist frame, a number of movements have been
identified (see Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane [eds],
Modernism, 1976):
▪ decadence (distilling broad generational moods)
▪ imagism (relating to precise aesthetic programmes or theories)
▪ expressionism (naming already extant activities)
▪ symbolism (flourishing in a variety of places and passing from
nation to nation)
▪ vorticism (at work within small communities)
▪ futurism (defining a particular generation)
Considering their interrelatedness, one may observe a frenzy of
forms and artistic energies variously expressed and variously justified,
may see strange channels of influence and shifts of meaning, may
recognize different conventions and symbols operative worldwide.
More technical concepts, taken up from the visual arts – where they
are grouped under the umbrella terms of Art Deco or Art Nouveau – and
associated with modernist trends are:
▪ impressionism
▪ surrealism
▪ fauvism
▪ cubism
They all build up a shift away from the romantic nuances of
symbolism towards a harder, mechanised, more impersonal or classical
form of image; from an assertive aestheticism towards a more crisis-ridden
view of the modern artistic situation; from an ambition of artistic wholeness
to a fascination with decreation. (op. cit: 201)
Meaning to discover significant artistic structures in the increasingly
chaotic situation at the beginning of the twentieth century, to express
concern with the pressure of industrial environment and accelerating
change, to discard ‘the word’ in favour of ‘the thought’, all these
movements formulate radical politics, of significance for the ensuing
generations.
In literature, as in the other arts, one has to distinguish between the
modern and the modernist, starting from the assumption that a writer
producing his work during modern times does not necessarily have
to write in a modernist way, but might prefer to be the continuator of
some already established tradition. (see David Lodge, The Modes of
Modern Writing - 1983 and Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction -
1992)
With regard to the novel, tradition on the modern stage is almost
synonymous with realism which, together with reality, is a central, though
8 Modernism and the Novel in English

Modernism
controversial, issue. To underline the transformations having occurred

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

Modernism
fluid, complex handling of time that involves much cross-referencing

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

Modernism
▪ open-endedness as an invitation at excluding formal perfection

This modernist modern novel deliberately loses touch with the
everyday world, not only by ceasing to write about it, but by ceasing to
write about anything in ways easily accessible to the majority. (Randall
Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 1992: 213) Demonstrating and discussing
both the potential and the limitations of language and narrative, it
advances disturbing representations of itself as a consequence of the ruin
and desolation in the world, which eludes assimilation in familiar words or
literary forms.
1.2. Early Modernism (James, Forster, Conrad)

The novel that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century
from the ashes of the Victorian literary scene (no longer felt as matching or
appropriate for the changing world) was one that trespassed frontiers
previously respected, that brought the very local, national and parochial
English novel of the nineteenth century centre stage within the broader
international context of the time.
It turned the literary practices and techniques of the past upside
down and inside out, it voiced new ideals and drew up a new philosophy of
life and art.
The transformations suffered became very obvious at the macro-
structural level of each and every novel, and the literary-theoretical
writings of the modernists kept returning to the innovations promoted,
while at the same time parodying what they considered to be the absurdly
old fashioned realism of the realists. All this may be summed up as follows:
VICTORIANISM MODERNISM
Setting
▪ predominantly English ▪ involves other ‘nesses’
▪ presupposes an external quality ▪ moves inwards to the subtler,
(being an illustration of the world profounder inner dimension (of thought
outside) and feeling)
▪ is used to draw characters (the latter ▪ is opposed to characters (the latter are
are constituent parts of the settings) usually misfits, at war with alien settings)
▪ harmonious, whole, offering bird’s ▪ discrete, limited, narrow, fragmented,
eye views sum of stimuli
Plot
▪ carefully built ▪ broken, deconstructed
▪ logical and chronological (from the ▪ does not observe logic or
exposition stage to dénouement) chronology (reverses traditional
order)
▪ running parallel to the story level ▪ at times, absent altogether
Characters
▪ metonymical (standing for classes, ▪ individuals / individualities
groups)
▪ dynamic, involved in events ▪ static, meditative
▪ in close relationship with the world ▪ in flight from ‘real’ reality, isolated,
around trapped
▪ portrayed from an external, objective ▪ portrayed from within, subjectively
standpoint therefore
▪ physical development under focus ▪ spiritual maturation observed

Modernism
▪ (bildungsroman) ▪ (kűnstlerroman)
Time
▪ objective, historical, logical, ▪ subjective, fluid, elastic, the time of the
chronological (moving from the past, mind/heart (allowing free movement
through the present, to the future) backwards and forwards)
▪ observed at the level of the narrative ▪ disrupting narrative chronology
pattern also (analeptic, sylleptic and proleptic textual
spaces)
Narrative Technique
▪ basically objective ▪ mainly subjective
▪ first person autobiographical or third ▪ first and third person limited, interior
person omniscient monologue or free indirect discourse
▪ no abrupt changes of narrative ▪ shifting, multiple viewpoints
perspective
▪ separate narrative levels ▪ juxtaposed, interrelated layers of
narration
1.3. Experimentalism (Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence)

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

Modernism
sustained. The old clock ticked on within modernism’s new chronologies.

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

Representative Names and Titles
Chapter 2
REPRESENTATIVE NAMES AND TITLES
2.1. Henry James

▪ born in New York, in 1843
▪ grew up in a highly educated environment: his father - a writer on
philosophy and theology; his brother, William - a philosopher and
psychologist
▪ educated both in the United States and Europe
▪ adopted British citizenship one year before his death, in 1915
▪ novels: Roderick Hudson (1876), Daisy Miller (1877), The
Europeans (1878), Washington Square (1881), The Portrait of
a Lady (1881); The Bostonians (1886), The Princess
Casamassima (1886), The Tragic Muse (1890); The Spoils of
Poynton (1897), What Maisie Knew (1897), The Awkward Age
(1899), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors
(1903), The Golden Bowl (1904)
▪ ghost story: The Turn of the Screw (1898)
▪ essay: The House of Fiction (1957)
▪ travel writing: The American Scene (1907)
▪ autobiography: A Small Boy and Others (1913), Notes of a Son
and a Brother (1914), Terminations (1917)
▪ died in 1916
Henry James’s career as a novelist began and ended with works

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

His name is now associated with psychological realism, whose very

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

brought off its pedestal and the limited, subjective narrator/focaliser is

given credit instead.
The Portrait of a Lady
One of the novels belonging to Henry James’s early period of

creation, The Portrait of a Lady formulates its author’s credo and
philosophy. Rooted in its author’s personal experience and choosing a
woman/feminine presence for its centre, it is humanly and artistically fertile,
speaking of secret selves and social imposition, while looking into
appropriate artistic modes for expressing them. Described by many as far-
fetched or artificial, too much preoccupied with the upper classes and the
well off, it is however deliberately so; illuminating on the internal drama of
the human psyche is only possible and justifiable if the choice of
characters is appropriate and they are people who are free from material
worry and pressure.
The novel develops the international theme, while simultaneously
focusing on an intelligent character who comprehends experience and
who is articulate enough to depict all events and actants in detail, to
plunge into the subtleties of conversation and its pragmatic functions. It
presents Isabel Archer’s spatial journey from America to Europe and her
spiritual illumination as a result of having entered a cultural other. Caught
between parallel mirrors, the young woman finds it difficult to know who
she is, what she wants or, more importantly it seems, how the others
perceive her.
Isabel comes to Europe accompanied by her aunt, Mrs. Touchett.
The Old Continent is full of surprises for her. The cultural image she had
built of it lingers in her mind until it is to be shattered by the unfortunate
experiences she is to be subjected to. The moment she emerges from the
States, Isabel is readily labelled as strange, independent and naïve. As
the novel unfolds, Isabel is gradually shown as unaware of the way in
which she is looked upon, then as striving to convince others of their
misjudging her, and finally as having accepted the new (for her) European
social norms which she now begins to analyse, interpret and find possible
cures for. Her journeys through the continent that now has a direct effect
upon her help her along in her quest for the real, multi-faceted woman
underneath the socially imposed mask and inform the reader on the
writer’s own plight to uncover human nature in the raw.
In her attempt at finding a secure social status and at being accepted
by society, Isabel searches for a husband. Nonetheless, from the
numerous eligible men around she is to pick the wrong one: Gilbert
Osmond. On hearing that Isabel has inherited a fortune from her cousin
Ralph Touchett, Osmond (himself an American, but already contaminated
by the European conventional, artificial values, from having spent too
much time there), together with Madame Merle or, better still, manipulated
by the lady, accepts to begin courting Isabel so as to provide himself and
his illegitimate daughter by Madame Merle (Pansy) with a considerable
dowry.
The victim of a carefully knit plot and of her own youth, beauty,
innocence and wealth, Isabel embarks on a meandering journey through
life. Caught in a loveless marriage, constantly cheated and lied to, utterly
unhappy, she seeks refuge in her own thoughts, within the inner
dimension, which is thus explored by James with a view to formulating his

oblique, though biting, philosophy of life in the wilderness of the social

milieu.
Manipulating plot on different levels and to different degrees, James
builds a panoramic view of the world and (wo)man within it, while at the
same time abandoning the traditional path in fiction, by numerous
incursions into the complex web of human feeling and thought. His style,
diction and sentence structure (asking of efforts on the part of the reader)
illustrate the content and message better than any authorially intrusive
passages or clear explanatory notes might ever hope to.
The ending of the novel conforms to the already established pattern,
being partly open (laying the burden of interpretation on the reader); it is
nonetheless optimistic, presenting the possibility of Isabel’s finally having
found the right path in life after numerous and tiresome journeys through
Europe and the labyrinth of her mind and soul. Caspar Goodwood shows
up at the residence of Isabel’s only true friend (Henrietta Stackpole)
looking for Isabel, whom he loves, and who obviously loves him back. At
first sent away, he is then stopped from departing, which allows the reader
to infer that a possible reunion lies ahead.
2.2. Edward Morgan Forster

▪ born in London, in 1879
▪ educated at Tonbridge School and King’s College, Cambridge
▪ lived in Italy and Egypt, spent some years in India (1912, 1921)
▪ lectures at Cambridge: Some Aspects of the Novel
▪ one of the founders and leading figures of the ‘Bloomsbury Group’,
together with Virginia Woolf and others
▪ novels: Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest
Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), Howard’s End
(1910), A Passage to India (1924), Maurice (1971, posthumously)
▪ collections of short stories: The Celestial Omnibus (1914), The
Eternal Moment (1928), The Life to Come (1972, posthumously)
▪ collections of essays: Abinger Harvest (1936), Two Cheers for
Democracy (1951) – on politics, literature and society
▪ autobiography: The Hill of the Devi (1953) – on his experiences
in India
▪ literary criticism: Aspects of the Novel (1927)
▪ died in 1970
Edward Morgan Forster’s literary work primarily belongs to the realist

mode of writing; his ideas, however, are sooner to be associated with the
liberal tradition. An Englishman caught within the Englishness of his
national past and literary tradition, he begins rebelling against outmoded
patterns of thought and behaviour, and helps to form the ‘Bloomsbury
Group’ – whose members dedicated a lot of time and effort to the raising
of consciousness towards the necessity of change, innovation, the break
with the past, modernism in a word. He remains therefore only partly
anchored in the legacy of Victorianism, with his concern for minute
descriptions of setting and his keen interest in criticising (however
obliquely) the society of the nineteenth century.
Forster’s dominant theme is that of the habitual conformity of people
to unexamined social conventions. It forms the basis for elaborate
discussions on the condition of the individual as trapped ‘under the net’ of

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

familiar places) is embedded in it so that the notion of otherness becomes

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

three parts, all of which unfold central symbols: The Mosque, The Caves
and The Temple. On the one hand, they run parallel to the three seasons
in the Indian year (the cold weather, the hot weather and the rains), on the
other they point to the multiplicity of India (from the linguistic, ethnic,
religious, cultural point of view). The India that the title announces and the
novel colonises is thus omnipresent, stamping the whole novel with what
the West perceives as its exoticism and eccentricity.
The Indian ingredient is what makes A Passage to India a
refreshing writing and reading experience, what distances Forster from the
rather dull modes and manners of his earlier work. At the other end, there
stands England, Britain, with all the cultural stereotypes one defines it in
terms of: rigidity, superiority, the Empire. It is used as a starting point, a
pretext for the journey to distant territories, for the obvious invitation to
reconsider, with Adela Quested, the inertia of the mainstream English
literary tradition.
The central character, a woman, has the symbolical function of
fertilising the novel discourse and, as her very name suggests, begins a
journey meant to help her rediscover herself; the quest, however, is
imposed on her, as she is not aware from the very beginning of the need
for change. Adela initially seems to be content with who she is and what
she represents, but as she covers new ground and goes through totally
new experiences, she becomes wiser, more mature, is ‘in quest’ rather
than ‘quested’ so to say. Her passivity is replaced by dynamic activity the
moment she understands that she had been living a lie or a dream for
years on end.
Adela travels to India to visit her fiancé, Ronny, accompanied by Mrs.
Moore, her future mother-in-law. Unaware of the powerful influence that
this country is to have on her, she imagines that she can contaminate
India with her Englishness rather than fall prey to its tremendously acute
Indianness. The imperial theme of the book may be gathered from its early
pages, where the comic tone adopted emphasises the condescending

attitude of the coloniser towards the colonised. The cultural clash that the
two women, together with many others, are subjected to makes them the
victims of their own misconceived ideas, of racial prejudice and
incomprehension. The East meets the West in Forster’s novel to obliquely
criticise mentalities deeply rooted in the English tradition, but also to
seriously pose problems regarding false perceptions of someone else’s
truths.
The climactic point of the novel presents the two women visiting the
Marabar Caves, whose dark, almost pagan setting stirs Adela’s
imagination to such an extent as to determine her to believe that the
Indian doctor accompanying them, Dr. Aziz, is sexually aroused by her
presence and that he misbehaves. Adela’s public denunciation of Aziz is
followed by a trial that Forster uses to present his whole philosophy of life
and art against. Adela, now confronted by the judges, has to decide
whether she should confess to her having been mistaken and to only
having had a vision (due to her own thoughts on the necessity of love in
marriage), or whether she should conceal the truth and firmly defend her
position.
Through juxtaposing that particular moment from her past and her
courthouse present, Forster makes her reconsider both and reach the best
decision: that of admitting to having accused the young man unjustly and
being honest to herself above everything else. Baffled and confused,
everyone present is shocked to hear of human truths publicly confessed to,
maybe with the exception of Fielding, Forster’s own voice in the novel, the
character who pronounces value judgements and sends to the novel’s
ultimate purpose.
The ending suggests circularity and voices Forster’s continuous
preoccupation with connections and links: the then and the now, the here
and the there, the me and the not-me, the good and the evil, life and death
come together after Mrs. Moore’s death in the religious ceremony
concluded by the capsizing of a boat – which breathes uncertainty whether
the worshippers are shouting in wrath or joy while fireworks go off and rain
spoils the decorations.
2.3. Joseph Conrad

▪ born in Poland, in 1857
▪ real name: Jósef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski
▪ brought up in a family of rich landowners
▪ after the death of his parents and the family ruin, went out at sea
▪ joined the crew of a French ship in 1874 and of an English one in
1878
▪ took British citizenship in 1884
▪ became qualified as a ship’s captain
▪ travelled to the Mediterranean, South America, the Far East,
Central Africa
▪ novels: Almayer’s Folly (1896), An Outcast of the Islands
(1896), Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1907), The Secret Agent
(1907), Under Western Eyes (1911)
▪ novellas: The Nigger of the Narcissus (1898), Youth and the
End of the Tether (1902), Heart of Darkness (1902), Typhoon
(1903), Chance (1914), Victory (1915), The Shadow Line (1917),

The Arrow of Gold (1919), The Rescue (1920), The Rover

(1923), Suspense (unfinished)
▪ collections of short stories: Tales of Unrest (1898)
▪ collections of essays: Notes on Life and Letters (1921)
▪ autobiography: A Personal Record (1912)
▪ novels in cooperation : The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903)
▪ died in 1924
Conrad too may be looked upon as a writer very much indebted to

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

commas and double inverted commas to suggest the juxtaposition of the

levels and the frontiers of fictionality.
Conrad may be additionally considered a symbolist, most of his
novels being rounded up as against a single symbol (his favourite are
ivory, gold, silver, diamonds, money – standing for evil and upturning the
trend). His symbolism is therefore reversed, intended to shock and instruct
at he same time.
His novels/novellas may broadly be grouped into two categories, in
keeping with the type of setting they presuppose: with sea settings (The
Nigger of the Narcissus, Lord Jim, Youth and the End of the Tether,
Typhoon, Heart of Darkness); with diverse, land settings (Nostromo,
The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, Chance, Victory, The
Rescue).
Linking setting with characters, the novelist plays with the reader’s
expectations and shocks by finding unconventional solutions to extreme,
out-of-the-ordinary situations. For him, the tangible object world is less
significant than what is impalpable and lies within; the outer universe,
despite its realistic portrayal, functions only as a stimulus meant to trigger
inner reactions which are placed under the lens of scrutiny and which
serve in rounding up characters struggling to discover their true nature in
the most trying of circumstances and the strangest of environments.
Finally, it should be stated that it was out of Joseph Conrad’s
adventurous life, that his fiction came – an exemplification of that particular
freedom of those who breathe it, who need it to feel at home in the world.
Like Ernest Hemingway, with whom he is often associated, Conrad
anchors his stories in his personal experience and the autobiographical
vein of his writings constitutes itself in a subtle politics of writing in the
language of the ‘other’. Unlike Hemingway, however, Conrad experiments
with fiction’s own structural mechanisms rather than with character
building, style and subject matter.
Heart of Darkness
Inspired by a voyage that Conrad took on the Congo around the

1890s, the novella processes a historical reality: the exploitation and
robbery of the African peoples by the Europeans. It is suffused by an
atmosphere of death and decay, one that perfectly defines the rottenness
at work within the social and political systems of the time.
Central to the work is Marlow, the secret sharer, who tells the story of
Kurtz – a European who arrives in Africa as a young idealist imagining that
his task is that of bringing light into the African darkness and who stays on,
becoming a degenerated product of his own actual greed for power and
material wealth. Attracted by the ivory of Africa and aware of the naivity of
the locals, Kurtz is lured into the darkness of his own nature and slowly
turns into the embodiment of evil itself. His eventual death frees him of his
condition and illuminates on the meaning(lessness) of his life.
Marlow’s task is that of narrator, but also that of narrated and
narratee. Following in Kurtz’s footsteps, he begins by narrating,
unconventionally, about someone who lies ahead spatially and behind
temporally. While he makes a journey similar to Kurtz’s, Marlow weaves
stories about the latter (that he hears on his way to Africa) into his own
narrative and ends by identifying himself with Kurtz – the subject and
object of his queries. Their finally meeting is a central point in the novella,

since it brings about a symbolical contamination and exchange: Kurtz’s life

in Africa induces the death of Marlow’s innocence and optimism, and
Kurtz’s death fertilises Marlow’s imagination which, in its turn, gives life to
a second narrative in reverse.
The journey backwards is doubled by another version of the story
already told, one that is more credible, being rooted in what the reader
understands is Marlow’s first hand experience with Kurtz. Nevertheless,
Conrad does not stop here his experimenting with fiction.
The ending he provides his novella with, besides being double (like
the whole text), is open to interpretation and disillusioning for those who
have imagined it to have been anchored in any kind of traditional literary
realism. When Marlow goes to see Kurtz’s fiancée – the woman he had
left behind and who had desperately waited for him to return or to at least
send her a brief message – he finds himself in the difficult situation of
either lying to her or breaking her heart. When she wants to know whether
Kurtz’s last words had been of her, Marlow’s only choices are to tell her
the truth, and utter the terrible pronouncement that had sealed Kurtz’s final
passage – ‘“The horror! The horror!” (Heart of Darkness, 1999: 97) – or to
tell her that, indeed, her name had been on his lips during that ultimate
moment. He makes the second choice which, for the reader, is not only
humane or commonsensical, it is also bitter ironical, cynical and obliquely
metafictional. It invites at reconsidering the text from yet another
standpoint, which seems to have been Conrad’s intention all along.
This double-layered narrative, presupposing a frame and an
embedded story, two plots and two interchanging roles therefore, is one in
which Joseph Conrad’s art as a modernist may be seen at work in the
context of his contemporary age and against prejudices of all kinds: social,
political, cultural, literary.
Its realism lies in that it offers glimpses into how truths are perceived
in reality, how they are constructed, how they are manipulated to serve
individual purposes.
Its reversed symbolism demolishes pretentions and disturbs the
inertia that has led to perceiving the external other in negative terms,
without any thorough consideration of the otherness that lies within.
A book about the fascination with evil, experienced intellectually by
Marlow and sensuously by Kurtz, Heart of Darkness uses the colour
white to denote that evil which the West automatically associates with the
black. It formulates a politics that transgresses the frontiers of space, of
race and defines man at war with himself, with that which, unless
annihilated, or at least acknowledged, threatens to destroy the precarious
equilibrium which, for the time being, maintains us all afloat.
2.4. Virginia Woolf

▪ born in London, in 1882
▪ novels: The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), Jacob’s
Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927),
Orlando: A Biography (1928), The Waves (1931), The Years
(1937), Between the Acts (1941)
▪ essays: Books and Portraits (1904), The Common Reader:
First Series (1925), The Common Reader: Second Series
(1932), A Room of One’s Own (1929), The Death of a Moth

(1942), The Moment (1947), The Captain’s Death Bed (1950),

Granite and Rainbow (1958)
▪ biography: Flush: A Biography (1933), A Writer’s Diary (1953,
published by Leonard Woolf)
▪ short stories: A Haunted House (1943)
▪ died in 1941
A member of the Bloomsbury Group (together with Clive Bell – art

critic; Roger Fry – art critic and painter; John Maynard Keynes –
economist; Lytton Strachey – historian; Leonard Woolf – writer and
publisher; Vanessa (Stephen) Bell – painter; Duncan Grant – painter;
Desmond MacCarthy – journalist and editor; Adrian Stephen –
psychoanalyst; Saxon Sydney-Turner – civil servant), Virginia Woolf has
played an active part on the intellectual scene of the early twentieth
century. Like the other members of the group that made the London
district enter literary history, she was committed to the rejection of the
strictures and taboos of Victorianism on religious, artistic, social, and
sexual matters, and took steps towards implementing a new politics of
liberation from the yoke of the past.
The writer has contributed to the development of the art of fiction. As
a critic, she excels in conveying the impression made by an author or a
work upon the receptive and cultivated mind. Both her fiction and her non-
fictional writing create a vivid impression on the joys and the agonies of
creative art. Inside her novels the characters, when not actually involved in
artistic enterprises, use their extraordinary gifts of sensitivity and insight to
look beyond the surface of things and re-create volatile but beautiful
worlds to replace the material one.
She deliberately experiments with the form of the novel, minimising
the importance of facts, events and character analysis in order to
concentrate on the moment by moment experience of living: intense,
rewarding, summing up the essence of existence and transcending spatial
and temporal boundaries. Eliminating the author as narrator or
commentator, Woolf’s prose directly accesses consciousness, and
rediscovers refracted images of the self projected on the background of
the twentieth century alienating history. Narrative consciousness functions
therefore as a silent camera creating perspectives which constitute stories.
It looks toward a centre of transcendent meaning which is finally
discovered in the silence between the acts of the personal and the social
dramas and, above all, in the mysterious power of consciousness to
conceive such a drama. All this is foregrounded by characters who are
allowed to ‘speak’ their minds and blur the distinctions between the factual
and the fictive.
Melting away the pre-modern rounded character, logically articulated
plot and solidly specific setting, Virginia Woolf’s novels share the following
characteristics:
▪ the climax of the plot is pushed to its margins, leaving a disturbing
empty space to be gradually filled in
▪ the minds of characters with limited knowledge are placed at the
centre, subjectivity assuming the manipulative roles of showing
and telling
▪ the narrative business inheres in repetitive symbolical structures
which hide the simile and metaphor embroidery

Her novels may also be described as autobiographical, in the sense that

they:
▪ exorcise childhood traumas (being brought up without a mother,
living under the shadow of a rigid and powerful father figure etc)
▪ hide underneath the parchment of the fictional, matching worries
of the real (insanity and death)
▪ have the liberating effect of a therapeutic cure consisting in
mastering fears and pronouncing the unutterable
▪ reflect on woman and womanhood under the crossfire of inertia
and progress
Another connection usually made with the writer’s works is that of
feminist preoccupations. Ranked among the first feminists in English
literature, Virginia Woolf strives to find a way out of the male governed
language and, aware of the difficulties, analyses the process itself. ‘I have
the feelings of a woman,’ says Bathsheba in Far from the Madding
Crowd, ‘but I have only the language of men.’ From that dilemma arise
infinite confusions and complications. Energy has been liberated, but into
what forms is it to flow? (Men and Women, in Books and Portraits, 1977:
44) The question is not simply a rhetorical one. Answers are provided
inside the textuality of her texts – poetic, symbolic and metaphorical,
femininely fertile. Romantically exploring abyssal states of mind and
discovering the mystery of human inner experience in correlation with the
external universe, Woolf manages abstract identifications with its ‘values’,
which unleash profound considerations of the nature of fiction and woman
inside it rather than part of a social network of impositions and
misattributed roles.
Mrs. Dalloway
A novel which chronologically covers a twenty-four hour span, Mrs.

Dalloway presents nonetheless a lifetime of glimpsed moments and
recollections in the life of Clarissa Dalloway – the older, more mature
version of the Clarissa in The Voyage Out. The day is spent making
arrangements for the party they are having in the evening for Richard’s
friends and acquaintances. The days revisited are those of her youth, long
gone, but magically present in her thoughts.
The setting is London – urban, crowded, bustling with life, but
imposing numerous forms of death. Symbolical are: Big Ben – standing for
the authority of time; the Houses of Parliament – for the authority of the
law, Westminster Cathedral – for that of the church.
All these elements of the setting cast long shadows over Clarissa
and speak to the reader about the dangers of being crushed under the
heel of power structures, submerged into the uniformity of acceptance.
They are also embodiments of Victorian realities, of Victorian realism and
of Victorian male-governed traditions – that Virginia Woolf is careful to
wittingly unmask. Or, as she suggests in her Literary Geography: A
writer’s country is a territory within his own brain; and we run the risk of
disillusionment if we try to turn such phantom cities into tangible brick and
mortar. […] Of all the books therefore the books that try to impress upon
the mind the fact that great men were once alive because they lived in this
house or in that are those that seem to have least reason for their being,
for Thackeray and Dickens, having done with earthly houses, live most
certainly in our brains. (in op. cit.: 189)

In flight from the object world ‘objectively’ portrayed, Mrs. Dalloway

brings the modernist alternative of presenting the materiality of the flow of
human thought triggered by external stimuli and its protagonist, caught in
between, narrates from both ends with the aid of free indirect style: in the
third person, from a distance, about the reflected ‘I’.
Walking through London, buying flowers, giving orders to servants,
getting dressed or making polite conversation, Clarissa is permanently
aware that the automatism of her life can only be countered by the retreat
into the inner dimension. Middle aged and hollow deep down (despite her
position, wealth, marriage), she begins a journey inwards and backwards,
hoping to retrace the crucial moments in her past and re-make the
decisions that have brought her where she is today. Using men as mirrors,
Clarissa puts together the reflections of herself to reach some
understanding of life, which she no longer feels connected to.
Her husband, Richard Dalloway, the man whom she had chosen for
the name and the status that he brought with him, cannot really see her
and therefore neither can she see herself in him. There is no true
communion between the spouses, who live under the same roof, but who
are strangers to each other. The opaque glass separating them is one of
habit, of convention.
Peter Walsh, the man she had been in love with but had rejected out
of fear for the future ahead, gains in stature and positive features as her
mind embellishes the past by strict comparison with the meaninglessness
of the present. In him, she sees herself loved, happy and fulfilled.
Septimus Warren Smith is a young man Clarissa has never really
met. She has only passed by him in the street, but can perfectly read into
his transparency. He is mentioned by Dr. Bradshaw, the psychiatrist, at
dinner (as having committed suicide that very afternoon by throwing
himself out of a window) and she fully empathises with his fate, seeing her
own alienation avenged by his final gesture.
Looking deeper into Septimus’s case, Clarissa fails to acknowledge
the part played by the war in the destruction of this ‘warren’ character who
is no longer capable of drawing the line between his present and his past
involvement in the cataclysm. Haunted, like Septimus, by images and
sounds of another war, she is horrified to discover how attracted she has
become to death – that awaits her behind a window similar to the young
man’s: old age in the near future.
The symbolic window, besides Septimus’s actual one, standing for a
barrier, for the separation between worlds, is recurrent in the novel and it
serves to delineate between tradition and innovation, with an obvious
emphasis on the latter as life, opposing the death or deadly influence of
the former. Illustrative in this respect are the last pages of the book, which
present Clarissa meditating on life, death and timelessness while standing
in front of a window (or mirror) and looking across the street where, behind
yet another window, an old woman is silently turning off the light and going
to bed.
From early morning to late at night and from the early years to late
maturity, Clarissa Dalloway travels across wide spaces, although she
seems to be standing still, frozen in a posture photographers might envy.
The party almost over, her quest remains unfinished, postponed for the
day to come.

2.5. James Joyce

▪ born in Rathgar, Dublin, in 1982
▪ educated at the Jesuit schools Clongowes Wood College and
Belvedere College, and at University College, Dublin.
▪ lived in Ireland, Italy, Switzerland and France
▪ poems: Chamber Music (1907);
▪ short stories: Dubliners (1914)
▪ a play: Exiles (1918)
▪ novels: A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man (1914-15),
Ulysses (1922), Finnegans Wake (1939)
▪ died in Paris, in 1941
James Joyce has revolutionised the form and structure of the novel
in the development of the stream of consciousness techniques which push
language to the extreme limits of communication. His fiction has been
praised and criticised, but it remains true that it has attracted the attention
of readers and critics alike. Described as forming an amazing maze which
entraps and disturbs, it leaves one to judge what is really underneath the
formal experimentation with words on the page. Reader-based therefore,
although very much anchored in the Joycean context, it speaks differently
to different addressees, forwarding the game and opening doors for
accessing disturbing paths.
Joyce has made considerable efforts to find new forms and new
symbols for the equally new patterns of experience. Working both on a
grand scale and a minute one, he has succeeded in catching the essence
of man diluted in/by the world he lives in. His literary achievements have
been ranked among the foremost realist, naturalist, experimentalist ones
of the western canon.
As a realist, James Joyce’s observations are unerring, his concrete
representations remaining discernible even when covered by multi-layered
artifice. His characters exist in a kind of inevitable reality suggested by
their daily struggle with survival, by their constantly being at odds with
external impositions and inner drives.
As a naturalist, he exaggerates the apparently inessential, the
generally overlooked, to stir reactions and shape attitudes. His inward
journey beyond the surface of things is not only philosophical but medical,
surgical even – dissecting slices of life which carry traces of ourselves in
them.
As an experimentalist, Joyce seems more concerned with manner
than with substance. The many rhetorical devices and narrative
techniques he uses, together with the vocabulary he invents are
distracting enough to keep the reader busy with solving the puzzle thus
formed and innovative enough to demand attention and distance the
reader from the actual content. Linking idiom to character building, setting
description and narrative management, the writer constructs gravitational
fields or spheres of influence which are neither unique nor new, but are
employed unusually frequently and adroitly and extend unusually far.
Joyce’s idiosyncratic zones of language are not used exclusively to reflect
the sphere of influence of characters, but even […] to indicate certain
linguistic idiosyncrasies associated with particular places. (Randall
Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 1992: 48)

Joyce’s writing has developed gradually, to reach its climactic point in

Ulysses, where spectacular modernist techniques are employed craftily
throughout. In Dubliners, his text remains fairly conventionally realistic,
containing satirical presentations of inert, paralysed Dublin. From the first
person narrative to free indirect style, the collection covers a variety of
practices, all aimed at disclosing the inner universe of each and every
protagonist without, however, illustrating the polyphony of the world in its
entirety. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the centre is formed
by the hero’s consciousness, the realistic detail being given up, indirect
projections of the world around replacing them and composing the
symphony of voices heard, remembered or anticipated.
The structuring principle lying at the heart of James Joyce’s fluid
fiction is that of epiphany (moment of artistic apprehension, which
concentrates states of intense revelation and illumination) – developed on,
metafictionally, in A Portrait. Inspired from Thomas d’Aquinas’s theory of
the conditions of beauty, epiphany is achieved through three stages:
integritas (wholeness), consonantia (harmony) and claritas (radiance).
They describe the accessing of the contingent and its turning into
potentially artistic, valuable material: the thing is apprehended and isolated
from surrounding ones, it is then analysed in its constituent parts whose
symmetry is understood, and then further essentialised, therefore
epiphanised, resulting in a state of pleasure and delight with the onlooker.
In other words, the writer formulates an artistic credo, suggesting that
there is beauty all around, or that everything is worth being exploited in a
work of art. This aesthetics of the ugly and the unseen has found concrete
formulations in James Joyce’s poetry and prose, one that has inspired
many a writer in the years since.
Ulysses
A novel emblematic for the twentieth century, Ulysses anchors the

difficult now in the mythical then, revisiting tradition to explain modernity. It
reconstructs Homer’s Odyssey and closely follows the latter’s structure.
To provide a framework for his work, Joyce creates a list of
correspondences to run through the text. The ‘schema’, as it is called,
links a ‘scene’, an hour, an organ of the body, an art, a colour, a symbol
and a ‘technique’ to each of the incidents he took from Homer. (David
Pritchard, James Joyce, 2001: 103) The eighteen chapters that make up
the book have titles which correspond to persons or episodes in the
classical epic: Telemachus, Nestor, Proteus, Calypso, Lotus Eaters,
Hades, Aeolus, Lestrygonians, Scylla and Charybdis, Wandering Rocks,
Sirens, Cyclops, Nausicaa, Oxen of the Sun, Circe, Eumaeus, Ithaca and
Penelope. Central are three protagonists or character-narrators: Stephen
Dedalus (standing for Telemachus) Leopold Bloom (standing for Ulysses),
and Molly Bloom (standing for Penelope). Their functional roles in the
novel divide it into three broad sections, woven around their person and
consciousness.
Stephen is a young, intelligent graduate, whose artistic, philosophical
mind is on display, revealing all its thinking patterns, decorated with
elevated incursions into universal poetry, Irish folklore, Greek philosophy
and Roman Catholic liturgy, and with seemingly random references to
obscure trivia. A schoolteacher recently returned from Paris upon news of
his mother’s being on her deathbed, Stephen is the autobiographical

character, already introduced in A Portrait, whose very name is

symbolical for Joyce’s condition of an Irishman (Stephen being the name
of an Irish martyr) and of a writer (Dedalus pointing to the prototype of the
artist, the maker of the beautiful and ephemeral).
Leopold, unlike analytical Stephen, relates to the environment in a
sensual, bodily way. Middle aged, of Jewish origin, married to a woman
who cheats on him and suffering from the loss of a father and a newly-
born son, he is a misfit, cut off from the community he lives in but has
nothing in common with. He spends his day wandering the city streets
(having forgotten his keys and not wanting to disturb his wife): from the
post office (to pick up responses for his advertisement for a secretary), the
chemist’s (to buy Molly soap and lotion), Glasnevin Cemetery (to attend a
funeral), the newspaper office (to work on his newest advertising
assignment), the National Library (to retrieve a specific graphic image), the
Burton Restaurant and Barney Kiernan’s Pub (to have something to eat)
and so on. This doomed wandering Jew crosses paths with Stephen and
eventually meets him, discovering in him the son he has dreamed of, while
he embodies the desired father for the younger man.
Molly sums up all the other women characters in the novel. Various
aspects of womanhood (and their transformations) are taken up and
shockingly developed through this character notorious for her coarse
language and sexual frankness. In the last chapter of the book, Molly
carries out the narratorial task, offering new insight to her devious nature,
in addition to the clues already provided by Leopold’s having meditated on
her infidelities and his unconditional love for her. Her interior monologue is
the most disturbing of all, thus illustrating the decadence of the present
day and the repercussions of the break with the morality and stability of
the past.
The setting is Dublin, whose alleys, bridges and quays are perfectly
recalled by the writer living in Paris at the time. The labyrinth of the city
streets is symbolical for the numerous traps and dangers the narrative
confronts the reader with. The familiar is defamiliarised and refamiliarised,
as ancient myths are brought to life and made to fit the matrix of Joyce’s
fictionalised, but accurately real Ireland.
Ulysses covers one day in objective temporal terms: the 16th of June,
1904. Subjectively however, the book takes us back and forth in time,
chronology being disrupted, rearranged, made to abide by the norms of a
different fluidity – that of the human mind, whose processes are
emphasised and help to guide along the narrative threads (or shreds). A
revolutionary literary effort, the novel playfully distorts its medium to
capture the broader picture envisaged. Its narrative does not simply
convey the story; it often shifts between a multitude of styles in order to
alternate meanings, to delineate resonances, to foreground ironies and to
counterpoint themes. It evolves from Anglo-Saxon and Latin roots, through
nine stages of development (represented by stylistic parodies of
consecrated authors: Shakespeare, Milton, Swift etc), to modern polyglot
slang, thus bringing all books into one and resuming the cultural heritage
in its most prominent instantiations.

2.6. David Herbert Lawrence

▪ born at Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, in 1885
▪ educated at University College, Nottingham
▪ lived in England, Italy, Australia, New Mexico
▪ novels: The White Peacock (1911), Sons and Lovers (1913),
The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), Aaron’s Rod
(1922), Kangaroo (1923), The Plumed Serpent (1926), Lady
Chatterley’s Lover (1928, expurgated edition)
▪ short stories: The Prussian Officer (1914), England, My
England (1922), The Woman Who Rode Away (1928)
▪ poems: Collected Poems (1928)
▪ essays: Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), Morality and the
Novel (1925), The Novel (1925), Why the Novel Matters (1936)
▪ died in Venice, in 1930
David Herbert Lawrence is the experimentalist who treats the inner

dimension with a view to exploring its emotional properties. His fiction
transcends the round, finished portraiture of the nineteenth century novel
and replaces it with an intense feeling of actually living, with characters
endowed with passion and spontaneity – acting in keeping with instinct
and impulse – and seeking complementation, the achievement of the
wholeness of being.
Otherwise said, he rejects conventional morality and favours nature
and the natural. Freed of inhibitions and detached from the bonds of
society, his characters have a naturalness (of thought, sentiment, speech
and conduct) which gratifies unspoken urges and desires in the reader.
And his fiction has been discarded, fought against, even banned from the
market due to this very obvious capacity to find appropriate wordings and
representations for taboos which, being forbidden, are accepted as
generally true. Lawrence’s truths in fiction are thus related to essential
human nature, to the presentation of the alter-ego present in each of us
but screened by the mask of convention.
As he suggests in the critical essays, the novel is of a crucial
influence on the way we live. It allows free expression and establishes
relationships between man and the world around, be it human or natural. It
teaches how to be and preaches a superior morality, accepting that
everything is true in its own time, place, circumstance and false outside.
Lawrence’s texts posit contexts within which feelings and reactions are
generated, developed, assumed, only to be replaced with others the
minute additional factors intervene. The close connection that exists
between the inner and the outer universes, between body and soul, body
and mind is the hard core the novelist keeps returning to so as to
revolutionise both private life and the sociology of English culture.
In the interplay of roles and identities that characterises his fiction,
one finds a constant return to childhood and the mythologies of class and
family, the autobiographical vein being more than obvious. Most of the
situations created are rooted in the Arthur Lawrence - Lydia Beardsall
pattern. The tension between his parents (the coarse coal miner and the
refined school teacher) is unleashed in various ways in the novels that he
writes, and it is usually the woman that is at once loved and feared,
desired and rejected, impossible to comprehend because complex and
‘other’.
Lawrence’s women dominate men and, in this reversal of power roles,

the formulation of pre-oedipal concerns and conflicts is forwarded: male
protagonists are usually smaller/younger than their female counterparts;
the women are potential mothers, absorbed in pregnancies or children;
when crossed, the women refer to their lovers as one does to babies or
young children; the women demand men’s acknowledging that they
depend on them, while fighting the burden of this dependency; women are
either very possessive or recoil from connection into singleness etc.
To a world of severe changes, Lawrence adds another: that of the
necessary transformation of fiction so as to include the previously
deliberate omissions. In as far as narrative technique is concerned,
Lawrence’s writing develops from a partly omniscient style to a more
flexible one. If, in Sons and Lovers, for instance, the shift from the
objective to the subjective materialises in descriptions of exfoliating inner
feelings following lines of conversation, in the later novels, like The
Rainbow and Women in Love, characters’ feelings are dramatised in
symbolic episodes which inform on what the characters themselves
cannot know, through their physical reactions to the scenes/events
witnessed. Another tactics developed is that of adapting language to
illustrate inner thought and the movements of the psyche, noticeable in the
free indirect speech pattern.
With reference to setting, Lawrence’s is mostly associable with the
northern, industrial, mining district of Nottinghamshire, where he himself
grew up. Its bleak atmosphere, harsh living conditions, specific dialect help
in giving the local aura intended, in amplifying the need to escape and find
completion and fulfilment. As elsewhere in his life and fiction (with father
opposing mother, England - the rest of the world, body - soul, instinct -
rational thought), dualism is present in the setting also, with the industrial
surroundings having the agricultural setting as a counterpart. The choices
remain open, and the struggle to bring the two together is all that counts.
Sons and Lovers
This overtly autobiographical novel about the destruction of the

instinctual man by the spiritual woman has brought D. H. Lawrence literary
fame. Combining realistic descriptions of working class life in Northern
England with psychological studies and symbolical patternings, it follows
the evolution of Paul Morel from early childhood to young maturity. His
relationships with three powerful women (his mother – Mrs. Morel, Miriam
Leivers and Clara Dawes) are interwoven to reflect on different angles of
the protagonist, on his way to achieving maturity, much in the tradition of
the bildungsroman, but nuanced with glimpses into the minutest of
movements of inner consciousness in response to sentiments triggered by
the outer world and the people inside it.
The first part of the novel introduces the reader to the Morel family
environment: one of conflict due to the incompatibility between a physically
stronger man (leaving the wife in an apparent weak position) and an
intellectually superior woman (slowly driving the husband to a state worthy
of contempt). Paul’s reactions are varied and communication rendered
futile. He wavers from love to hatred, silenced by the intensity of feeling
and the shock he experiences each time he attempts to come to grips with
the adult world of his parents. Nonetheless, he remains on his mother’s
side as, to him, she is the victim. In her turn, the old woman clings to him,

desperately searching for consolation for the death of her other son,
William, and for the loss of true marital affection. Gradually, she becomes
the victimiser, the suffocating presence in Paul’s life, which the latter
accepts unknowingly.
The subsequent sections cover Paul’s engaging with two younger
women, both of whom are barely enough for him to feel whole with, yet
both tremendously feared for their dominant streaks. Miriam stands for
innocence, virginity and the intellect, while Clara embodies experience,
sexuality and passion. Aware of the manipulative powers of such features,
Paul is at once captivated and terrified. In the end, he decides to abandon
them both, to free himself of their spell, although still possessed by that of
his now dead mother. The ending is open, awaiting answers to Miriam’s
unasked questions: Where would he go? What would be the end of him?
(Sons and Lovers, 1993: 445).
Struggling to achieve independence from all external stimuli and to
find personal and artistic fulfilment, Paul Morel seems to be Lawrence’s
own spokesperson in the novel. He allows the formulation of a central
Lawrencian theme, that of the search for some relationship which is large
enough to give importance to personal feelings but which will transcend
them. (Douglas Hewitt, English Fiction of the Early Modern Period:
1890-1940, 1994: 179) This is the doctrine that the writer continues to be
preoccupied with for the rest of his life and that he includes in his fiction
under one form or another.
In point of novel discourse, dramatic scenes are combined with
authorial comments, and vivid descriptions of natural objects are added to
sharp observations on human psychology, not so much to formulate
general truths as to represent immediate responses to real life situations
with actants and observers alike. Dynamic and subtle, Lawrence’s writing
presupposes sudden modifications of viewpoint and abrupt transitions in
narrative force. A little inconsistent for some, it does however reflect mood
changes and reaction fluctuations which are characteristic of the slices of
life caught under the covers of the book.
In time and space, the novel moves with the autonomy of modernism:
the personal is broader than and overlaps the general it belongs to. A life
sums up all others, a region shrinks the world at large. Universal man
emerges, a new chronology is established and the territories covered are
endless. Past, present and future merge, life and death become one, and
the awareness of the self is finally a healing experience: He could not bear
it. On every side the immense dark silence seemed pressing him, so tiny a
spark, into extinction, and yet, almost nothing, he could not be extinct.
Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and
sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spinning round for terror, and
holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them
all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at
the core a nothingness, and yet not a nothing. (Sons and Lovers: 446)


Tests
Chapter 3
TESTS
Use the glossary of literary terms to decode the texts and find appropriate
solutions to the tasks formulated.
3.1. Test One

“Dear me, who is that strange 1. Consider the way in which, on a
woman?” Mr. Touchett had asked. small scale, the excerpt develops the
“Perhaps it’s Mrs. Touchett’s niece broader preoccupation of the novel
– the independent young lady,” lord with the clash between worlds and
Warburton suggested. “I think she must cultures.
be from the way she handles the dog.”
The collie, too, had now allowed
his attention to be diverted, and he
trotted towards the young lady in the
doorway, slowly setting its tail in motion
as he went.
“But where’s my wife then?” 2. Search for ironical stances and
murmured the old man. remarks that contribute to the
“I suppose the young lady has left portrayal of the two worlds: America
her somewhere; that’s a part of the and Europe.
independence.”
The girl spoke to Ralph, smiling,
while she still held up the terrier. “Is this
your little dog, sir?”
He was mine a moment ago; but
you’ve suddenly acquired a remarkable
air of property in him.”
“Couldn’t we share him?” asked the 3. Find the embedded criticism
girl. He’s such a perfect little darling.” addressed to European narrow
Ralph looked at her a moment; she mindedness, preconceived ideas and
was unexpectedly pretty. “You may disregard of the ‘other’.
have him altogether,” he then replied.
The young lady seemed to have a
great deal of confidence, both in herself
and in others; but this abrupt generosity
made her blush. “I ought to tell you that
I’m probably your cousin,” she brought
out, putting down the dog. “And here’s
another!” she added quickly, as the 4. Point to the use of the dialogue
collie came up. as an intense, dramatic scene or
“Probably?” the young man event.
exclaimed, laughing. “I supposed it was
quite settled! Have you arrived with my
mother?”
“Yes, half an hour ago.”
“And has she deposited you and 5. Give examples of textual details
departed again?” which might help in defining James’s

Tests
“No, she went straight to her room, style as cautious, therefore

and she told me that, if I should see you, subjective.
I was to say to you that you must come
to her there at a quarter to seven.”
The young man looked at his
watch. “Thank you very much; I shall be
punctual.” And then he looked at his
cousin. “You’re very welcome here. I’m 6. Analyse the reflections of Isabel
delighted to see you.” offered by the other characters as
She was looking at everything with mirrors; refer to the metamorphosis
an eye that denoted clear perception – of cultural stereotypes.
at her companion, at the two dogs, at
the two gentlemen under the trees, at
the beautiful scene that surrounded her.
[…]
“Is one of those gentlemen your
father?” 7. Discuss the impact that this
“Yes, the elder one – the one many-filtered presentation of
sitting down.” said Ralph. character has upon the reader.
The girl gave a laugh. “I don’t
suppose it’s the other one. Who’s the
other one?”
“He’s a friend of ours – Lord
Warburton.”
“Oh, I hoped there would be a lord; 8. Comment on narrative technique,
it’s just like a novel!” specifying intentions and
repercussions.
(adapted from Henry James, The
Portrait of a Lady, in Novels 1881-
1886, 1985: 204-205
9. What values may be associated

with femininity and which with
masculinity? How does the text
illustrate them?
10. How may the fiction/reality

borderline alluded to in the excerpt
be accounted for?

Tests
3.2. Test Two

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

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

‘His was an impenetrable 1. Notice the simple and double
darkness. I looked at him as you peer inverted commas used. Mention their
down at a man who is lying at the role in connection with the double-
bottom of a precipice where the sun layered narrative pattern.
never shines. But I had not much time to
give him, because I was helping the
engine-driver to take to pieces the leaky
cylinders, to straighten a bent
connecting-rod, and in other such
matters. I lived in an infernal mess of
rust, filings, nuts, bolts, spanners, 2. Pick out the autobiographical
hammers, ratchet-drills – things I references in the text.

Tests
abominate, because I don’t get on with

them. I tended the little forge we
fortunately had aboard; I toiled wearily in
a wretched scrap-heap – unless I had
the shakes too bad to stand.
‘One evening coming in with a
candle I was startled to hear him say a 3. Mention where and how subtle
little tremulously, “I am lying here in the metafictional observations are made.
dark waiting for death.” The light was
within a foot of his eyes. I forced myself
to murmur, “Oh, nonsense!” and stood
over him as if transfixed.
‘Anything approaching the change
that came over his features I have never
seen before, and hope never to see 4. Analyse the unconventional
again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was narrative practices and techniques.
fascinated. It was as though a veil had
been rent. I saw on that ivory face the
expression of sombre pride, of ruthless
power, of craven terror – of an intense
and hopeless despair. Did he live his life
again in every detail of desire,
temptation, and surrender during that 5. Focus on Marlow – as narrator
supreme moment of complete and protagonist; how does his story
knowledge? He cried in a whisper at tell of his own character?
some image, at some vision – he cried
out twice, a cry that was no more than a
breath –
‘ “The horror! The horror!”
“I blew the candle out and left the
cabin. The pilgrims were dining in the
mess-room, and I took my place 6. Discuss the numerous
opposite the manager, who lifted his implications of Conrad’s reversed
eyes to give me a questioning glance, symbolism as obvious in the excerpt.
which I successfully ignored. He leaned
back, serene, with that peculiar smile of
his sealing the unexpressed depths of
his meanness. A continuous shower of
small flies streamed upon the lamp,
upon the cloth, upon our hands and
faces. Suddenly the manager’s boy put 7. Observe the irony of tone and
his insolent black head in the doorway, pinpoint its goals.
and said in a tone of scathing contempt:
‘ “Mistah Kurtz – he dead.”
‘All the pilgrims rushed out to see. I
remained, and went on with my dinner. I
believe I was considered brutally 8. Develop on as many intertextual
callous. However, I did not eat much. references as you can find.
There was a lamp in there – light, don’t
you know – and outside it was so
beastly, beastly dark. I went no more
near the remarkable man who had
pronounced a judgement upon the

Tests
adventures of his soul on this earth. The

voice was gone. What else had been 9. How may Kurtz’s last words be
there? But I am of course aware that interpreted?
next day the pilgrims buried something
in a muddy hole.
‘And then they very nearly buried
me.
‘However, […] I remained to dream
the nightmare out to the end, and to
show my loyalty to Kurtz once more. 10. Is there any proleptic force about
Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing life is – the fragment above?
that mysterious arrangement of
merciless logic for a futile purpose.
(adapted from Joseph Conrad, Heart of
Darkness and Other Stories, 1999: 97-
98)
3.4. Test Four

“Good morning to you, Clarissa!” 1. Which Woolfian theme might be
said Hugh, rather extravagantly, for they extracted from the excerpt?
had known each other as children.
“Where are you off to?”
“I love walking in London,” said
Mrs. Dalloway. “Really, it’s better than
walking in the country.”
They had just come up –
unfortunately – to see doctors. Other 2. Identify the autobiographical
people came to see pictures; go to the references, keeping in mind both the
opera; take their daughters out; the personal and the artistic.
Whitbreads came “to see doctors”.
Times without number Clarissa had
visited Evelyn Whitbread in a nursing
home. Was Evelyn ill again? Evelyn was
a good deal out of sorts, said Hugh,
intimating by a kind of pout or swell of
his very well-covered, manly, extremely 3. Analyse the way in which shifts
handsome, perfectly upholstered body in time and perspective contribute to
(he was almost too well dressed always, forwarding meaning.
but presumably had to be, with his little
job at Court) that his wife had some
internal ailment, nothing serious, which,
as an old friend, Clarissa Dalloway
would quite understand without requiring
him to specify. Ah, yes, she did of
course; what a nuisance, and felt very 4. Pick out the characteristic
sisterly and oddly conscious of her hat. features of the narrative technique
Not the right hat for the early morning, and give illustrative examples.
was that it? For Hugh always made her
feel, as he bustled on, raising his hat
rather extravagantly and assuring her
that she might be a girl of eighteen, and

Tests
of course he was coming to her party to-

night, Evelyn absolutely insisted, only a
little late he might be after the party at
the Palace to which he had to take one 5. Notice the indirectness of
of Jim’s boys – she always felt a little character drawing and describe Hugh
skimpy beside Hugh, schoolgirlish; but and Peter by rearranging the pieces
attached to him, partly from having of the puzzle.
known him always, but she did think him
a good sort in his own way, though
Richard was nearly driven mad by him,
and as for Peter Walsh, he had never to
this day forgiven her for liking him.
She could remember scene after
scene at Bourton – Peter furious; Hugh
not, of course, his match in any way, but 6. Discuss Clarissa’s reflections
still not a positive imbecile as Peter in/on the male other as mirror.
made out; not a mere barber’s block.
When his old mother wanted him to give
up shooting or to take her to Bath he did
it, without a word; he was really
unselfish, and as for saying, as Peter
did, that he had no heart, no brain,
nothing but the manners and breeding
of an English gentleman, that was only 7. Focus on Clarissa as narrator,
her dear Peter at his worst; and he narrated and, at times, narratee. Say
could be intolerable; he could be what you think the plusses and
impossible; but adorable to walk with on minuses of her multiple roles might
a morning like this. be.
(June had drawn out every leaf on
the trees. […] Arlington Street and
Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air
in the Park and lift its leaves hotly,
brilliantly, on the waves of that divine
vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance,
to ride, she adored all that.)
8. Consider the actual and
imaginary settings, specifying their
implications.
(adapted from Virginia Woolf, Mrs.
Dalloway, 1996: 7-8)
9. Are feminist positions expressed

anywhere in the text? Which? How
are they obvious?

Tests
10. Find the embedded criticism of

English stereotypes. Develop on the
modernism attached to it.
3.5. Test Five

In long lassons from the Cock Lake 1. Develop on the realism
the water flowed full, covering green- /naturalism/modernism of the text.
goldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing.
My ashplant will float away. I shall wait.
No, they will pass on, passing chafing
against the low rocks, swirling, passing.
Better get this job over quick. Listen: a
fourworded wave-speech: seesoo, hrss,
rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement breath of
waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, 2. Discuss the role of the numerous
rocks. In cups of rocks it slops: flop, figures of speech present in the
slop, slap; bounded in barrels. And, fragment.
spent, its speech ceases. It flows
purling, widely flowing, floating
foampool, flower unfurling.
Under the upswelling tide he saw
the writhing weeds lift languidly and
sway reluctant arms, hising up their
petticoats, in whispering water swaying
and upturning coy silver fronds. Day by 3. Make special reference to the
day; night by night; lifted, flooded and let symbolism of water, under its many
fall. Lord, they are weary; and, guises.
whispered to, they sigh. Saint Ambrose
heard it, sigh of leaves and waves,
waiting, awaiting the fullness of their
times, diebus ac noctibus iniursia
patiens ingemniscit. To no end
gathered; vainly then released, forth
flowing, wending back; loom of the 4. Extract the underlying theme.
moon. Weary too in sight of lovers,
lascivious men, a naked woman shining
in her courts, she draws a toil of waters.
Five fathoms out there. Full fathom
five thy father lies. At one he said.
Found drowned. High water at Dublin 5. Comment on the unconventional
bar. Driving before it a loose drift of vocabulary and punctuation Joyce
rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A chooses to make use of.
corpse rising saltwhite from the
undertow, bobbing landward, a pace a
pace a porpoise. There he is. Hook it

Tests
quick. Sunk though he be beneath the

watery floor. We have him. Easy now.
[…] 6. Detect the ironic and parodic
God becomes man becomes fish instantiations.
becomes barnacle goose becomes
featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I
living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a
urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark
over the gunwale he breathes upward
the stench of his green grave, his 7. Consider the shifts from the ‘he’
leprous nosehole snoring in the sun. to the ‘I’ and relate them to narrative
A seachange his brown eyes technique.
saltblue. Seadeath, mildest of all deaths
known to man. Old Father Ocean. Prix
de Paris: beware of imitations. Just you
give it a fair trial. We enjoyed ourselves
immensely.
Come. I thirst. Clouding over. No 8. See how the category of time is
black clouds anywhere, are there? handled and to what purpose.
Thunderstorm. Albright he falls, proud
lightning of the intellect, Lucifer, dico,
qui nescit occasum. No. My cockle hat
and staff and his my sandal shoon.
Where? To evening lands. Evening will
find itself. 9. Trace Joyce-the-man and Joyce-
He took the kilt of his ashplant, the artist in the web of textual design.
lunging with it softly, dallying still. Yes,
evening will find itself in me, without me.
All days make their end. By the way
next when is it? Tuesday will be the
longest day. Of all the glad new year,
mother, the rum tum tiddledy tum. Lawn 10. Find a plausible explanation for
Tennyson, gentleman poet. Già. the writer’s experimentally dealing
(adapted from James Joyce, Ulysses, with form, while traditionally handling
1989: 118) content.
3.6. Test Six

“What nonsense, mother – you 1. Discuss he text in terms of the
know I don’t love her – I – I tell you I normality/abnormality of the situation
don’t love her – she doesn’t even walk foregrounded. Underline the literary
with my arm, because I don’t want her connotations.
to.”
“Then why do you fly to her so
often!”
“I do like to talk to her – I never
said I didn’t. But I don’t love her.”
“Is there nobody else to talk to?”
“Not about the things we talk of.
There’s lots of things that you’re not 2. Trace the inner message of the
interested in, that –” excerpt in connection with

Tests
“What things?” Lawrence’s philosophy of life and art.

Mrs. Morel was so intense that
Paul began to pant.
“Why – painting – and books. You
don’t care about Herbert Spencer.”
“No,” was the sad reply. “And you
won’t at my age.”
“Well, but I do now – and Miriam
does.” […] He knitted his brows with 3. Follow the zigzagging from
pain. words and gestures to feelings, and
“You’re old, mother, and we’re develop on their interrelatedness.
young.”
He only meant that the interests of
her age were not the interests of his. But
he realized the moment he had spoken
that he had said the wrong thing.
“Yes, I know it well – I am old. And
therefore I may stand aside; I have
nothing more to do with you. You only 4. Consider the representations of
want me to wait on you – the rest is for the self as forwarded by the text.
Miriam.”
He could not bear it. Instinctively
he realized that he was life to her. And,
after all, she was the chief thing to him,
the only supreme thing.
“You know it isn’t, mother, you
know it isn’t.”
She was moved to pity by his cry. 5. What does the realism of the text
“It looks a great deal like it,” she consist in?
said, half putting aside her despair.
“No, mother, I really don’t love her.
I talk to her, but I want to come home to
you.”
He had taken off his collar and tie,
and rose, barethroated, to go to bed. As
he stooped to kiss his mother, she threw
her arms round his neck, hid her face on 6. Look into narrative practice and
his shoulder, and cried, in a whimpering technique between tradition and
voice, so unlike her own that he writhed innovation.
in agony:
“I can’t bear it. I could let another
woman – but not her. She’d leave me no
room, not a bit of room –”
And immediately he hated Miriam
bitterly.
“And I’ve never – you know – Paul 7. Analyse characters: men and
– I’ve never had a husband – not really women, and the power structures
–” associated with each.
He stroked his mother’s hair, and
his mouth was on her throat.
“And she exults so in taking you
from me – she’s not like ordinary girls.”
“Well, I don’t love her, mother,” he

Tests
murmured, bowing his head and hiding

his eyes on her shoulder in misery. His 8. Use your knowledge of the
mother kissed him a long, fervent kiss. writer’s life to pinpoint some of his
“My boy!” she said, in a voice sources of inspiration.
trembling with passionate love.
Without knowing, he gently stroke
her face.
“There,” said his mother, “now go
to bed. You’ll be so tired in the morning.”
As she was speaking she heard her
husband coming. “There’s your father – 9. How is the battle between the
now go.” Suddenly she looked at him wide range of human feelings and
almost as if in fear. “Perhaps I’m selfish. reason/judgement/knowledge
If you want her, take her, my boy.” brought forth by the excerpt?
(adapted from David Herbert Lawrence,

Sons and Lovers, 1993: 228-229)
10. What other similarly shocking

scenes have made Lawrence’s fame?

Tests

References
REFERENCES
Conrad, Joseph (1999) Heart of Darkness and Other Stories, London: Wordsworth
Classics
Forster, Edward Morgan (1989) A Passage to India, London: Penguin Books
James, Henry (1985) Novels 1881-1886: Washington Square, the Portrait of a
Lady, the Bostonians, New York: The Library of America
Joyce, James (1989) Ulysses, England: Oxford University Press
Lawrence, David Herbert (1993) Sons and Lovers, London: Wordsworth Classics
Woolf, Virginia (1996) Mrs. Dalloway, London: Penguin Books
Bradbury, Malcolm; James Mcfarlane (eds) (1976) Modernism, London: Penguin
Books
Hewitt, Douglas (1994) English Fiction of the Early Modern Period 1890-1940,
London and New York: Longman
Lodge, David (1983) The Modes of Modern Writing, Illinois: Whitehall Company
Wheeling
Pritchard, David (2001) James Joyce, Scotland: Geddes & Grosset
Stevenson, Randall (1992) Modernist Fiction, Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf
Woolf, Virginia (1977) Books and Portraits, London: Triad/Panther Books

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

additional to those made explicit on the literal surface
allusion reference made in a literary work to something that lies
outside it
analepsis flashback in narrative; reference to its past
archetype theme, image, pattern, character, interest, situations, plot
and personality recurrent in literature; myth
aside also known as ‘disclamer’; text which is added to the
fictional one proper and which comments on the latter’s
form/content
atmosphere the mood of a written work; it may be moral, sensational,
emotional or intellectual
bildungsroman ‘formation novel’; one which describes the protagonist’s
development from early childhood to maturity and old age
carnivalesque co-existence of multiple points of view available to plural
interpretations; works which subvert the literary culture of
the ruling classes and undermine their claim to moral
monopoly
characterisation the way in which characters are created and described
within a narrative, with a view to producing different
reactions in the reader(s); there are as many methods of
characterisation as there are ways of narrating
characters invented, imaginary people populating the universe of
fiction; access to them is enabled by means of dialogue,
action, description
collage the technique of gluing together otherwise disparate
elements; jumping from one topic to another by means of
fragmentary images
comic means of provoking sympathetic or derisive laughter
counternarrative narrative which disturbs grand narratives with a political or
manipulative function; innovative, anti-canonical
cubism 20th century style of art, in which objects and people are
represented by geometric shapes
decadence the state of having low moral standards and being more
concerned with pleasure than with serious matters
decentring in deconstruction, a term used to denote the opposition to
the centre (ideological, political, cultural, linguistic)
defamiliarisation making strange; making the familiar seem totally new, as if
it were seen for the very first time
dénouement the final unfolding of a plot, satisfying or denying the
reader’s expectations from a narrative
description the creation or representation in words of objects, people,
patterns of behaviour or scenes
dialogism the expression of a variety of viewpoints, leaving the reader
with open questions
diction the choice of words in a literary text; the kind of vocabulary
used

diegesis narrative, telling; the elemental story level of a narrative;

derived are: the homodiegetic level (of the story told in the
first person by a character-narrator); the heterodiegetic
level (of the story told in the third person by an authorial
narrator); the intradiegetic level (of events that are part of
the same story as the narrator’s); the extradiegetic level
(of events that are part of a different story than the
narrator’s)
digression a straying away from the main subject/idea; free association
disclaimer also known as ‘aside’; explanatory text running counter
reader expectation
discourse the ‘how’ of a narrative (as opposed to the ‘what’, or story
pattern); also ‘voice’
ellipsis omission of essential words; as a figure of speech: the
condensation of maximum meaning into the shortest form
of words
éloignement spatial or temporal distancing (usually with a view to looking
back at once familiar details from a different standpoint)
epiphany sudden meaning or insight carrying artistic potential
epistolary means of telling a story through letters of participants or
observers
existentialism philosophical trend which stresses the importance of
existence; takes the view that the universe is an
inexplicable, meaningless and dangerous theatre where the
responsibility of making choices determines the nature of
this existence and allows a freedom which results in a state
of anxiety (due to endless possibilities)
expressionism European artistic movement meaning to show reality as
distorted by an emotional or abnormal state of mind
fable short moralising tale in which animals act like human beings
fantastic unreal happening demanding supernatural and
psychological explanation; creates a state of suspended
understanding in the reader
fantasy the most playful kind of imagining, separated from any kind
of contact with the real world; in literature: a world which is
parallel to the real one
fauvism a 20th century style of painting which uses pure bright
colours
focalisation perspective or viewpoint adopted as the lens through which
particular events, descriptions or characters are seen and
reported
framing story the story that embeds other, successive stories by means
of mise-en-abîme
free indirect style a narrative technique which uses the third person to refer
back to a first person and juxtaposes direct and reported
speech
futurism early 20th century style of painting, music and literature that
expresses the violent, active qualities of modern life
grand narratives logical, chronological narratives covering whole lives, with
metonymical characters and a moralising tendency; based
on the Western evolutionary ideal of progress
grotesque deliberate distortion and ugliness intended to shock, satirise

or amuse
gynesis feminist critical orientation concerned with constructions of
women and womanhood
gynocritics feminist critical orientation concerned with the
characteristics of texts written by women
historiography the literary re-writing of history, where the past may be ‘set
right’ or made to move in different directions
hybridity mixture, usually in a cultural acceptance
idiolect the individual language system of a certain person (his/her
pronunciation, choice of vocabulary, usage, grammatical
forms)
image word picture, description of some visible scene or object;
more generally, reference to objects and qualities which
appeal to the senses and feelings
imagery commonly, the figurative language in a literary work; words
referring to things that appeal to the senses
imagism modernistic movement in art and literature aiming at a
musical presentation without adornment
imitation concept which underlies theories of realism; literature is
seen as a mirror held up to life
immasculation becoming masculine, authoritative, imposing; in feminist
terms: violent, manipulative
implied reader imagined, intended reader; also known as ‘encoded reader’
impressionism 19th century style of painting which uses colour instead of
details of form to produce effects of light or feeling
interior monologue means of narrating so as to convey in words the process of
consciousness
intertextuality the many and various kinds of relationships that exist
between texts; from this perspective, literature is seen as a
self-referential system or structure
intratext text presupposed by a self-referential text
irony saying one thing and meaning another; usually involving
understatement, concealment or allusion
juxtaposition deliberate multi-layering of narrative to produce special
effects
kűnstlerroman novel which focuses on the spiritual or artistic maturation of
its protagonist
leitmotif a recurrent motif (type of character, theme, image)
logocentrism the centrality (authority) of the word/ language
magic realism fiction which mixes and disrupts ordinary, everyday realism
with strange, impossible and miraculous episodes and
powers
metafiction fiction about fiction; elitist, narcissistic, circular or repetitive;
associated with ‘the literature of exhaustion’
mimesis imitation, reflection, mirroring of life/reality
mirrors reflectors; functional characters used to reflect on the
protagonist
montage art form in which a piece of writing is made from parts
belonging to different pieces
Movement (the) a school of poetry associated with the fifties, whose
representatives reasserted traditional values favouring a so-
called ‘no-nonsense’ tone

myth stories usually concerning gods or superhumans; a system

of myths voicing the religious or metaphysical beliefs of a
society; nowadays, that which culturally defines humanity
as a whole
narrated character/event that the narrative centres around
narratee implied, imagined figure in the text to whom a narrative is
told
narrative story in which a selection of incidents is made so as to
suggest some relationship between them; their sequencing
is also significant for the point intended
narrative technique method, skill of narrating (telling); manipulation of narrators
and points of view
narratology ‘science’ which studies the ‘grammar’ of narratives;
analysis, categorisation and theory of narratives
narrator he/she who tells the story; a narrator may be of an author
type or of a character type (usually associated with a third
or a first person narrative respectively); first person
narrators may be: unreliable (a character whose opinions
cannot be taken for granted since they are subjective) or
autobiographical (supposedly objective); third person
narrators may be: intrusive (commenting upon their
stories) or impersonal (somehow detaching themselves
from the stories they tell); omniscient (playing the God-
game and pretending to know everything about everybody)
or limited (presupposing a restricted, ‘human’ point of view)
naturalism an extension of realism; it claims scientific accuracy
nouveau roman French avant-garde, the experimental anti-novel of the 50s
and 60s
novel long fiction which concentrates on character and incident
and usually contains a plot; it covers a wide range of styles
and manners, subject matter and technique
omniscience God-like knowledge of characters, actions, situations,
thoughts
paradox statement which is apparently self-contradictory; one that
seems in conflict with reason and common sense
parody imitation of a particular work intended to ridicule its specific
features
petits histoires subjective stories about individual experiences glimpsed at
and allowed to connote
plot the pattern of relationships existing between events; the
‘how’ or ‘why’ of a narrative; ‘discourse’ in narratology
point of view the way in which the material and the audiences are
approached by a narrator
polyphony the co-existence of different voices (types of discourse) and
points of view in a literary work
prolepsis rhetorical term which refers to the anticipation of future
events in a narrative; flashforward
psychological style of writing in which the inner lives of the characters,
realism their ideas, feelings, mental and spiritual development are
realistically mirrored
pun ‘play upon words’; one and the same word may lead to
opposing meanings

realism the literary trend associated with the increasing relevance

of scientific investigation during the later half of the
nineteenth century; seeking to show up the false hopes and
fanciful aspirations of characters; mimetic, usually in
opposition with fiction which describes life as full of thrilling
adventure and fulfilled aspirations
repetition recurrent use intended to emphasize an idea or to create a
sense of pattern
romantic new interest in nature, corresponding with the investigation
of the self; exploring the complicated relationships between
things, feelings and ideas
setting the temporally-marked place against which characters are
presented and which determines them to a certain extent
short story small prose fiction concentrating on few characters, having
a simple plot and numerous descriptions; it provides a swift
dénouement (ending)
stereotype standard, fixed idea or mental impression; a cliché, an
ordinary perception made dull by constant repetition
story the logical and chronological sequencing of events told; the
‘what’ of a narrative
stream of the flow of human thought, usually rendered by means of
consciousness free indirect style and interior monologue
style the characteristic manner in which writers express
themselves or the particular manner of an individual work;
specific subject matter, vocabulary, imagery, diction etc.
suggestion ideas and meanings of language that are beyond the bare
literal significance
surrealism 20th century artistic trend which connects unrelated images
and objects in a strange way
syllepsis a simultaneous presentation of events that pertain to the
past, present and future of a narrative; a figure of speech,
also known as zeugma, in which words or phrases with very
different meanings are yoked together
symbol something which represents something else (usually an
idea or abstraction) by means of analogy or association
theme abstract subject of a work; central idea (explicit or implicit)
time in literature, it may be objective and/or subjective, the time
of the clocks and/or the time of the mind
tone manner or mood; attitude adopted by the ‘speaker’ in a
literary work
trope figurative language; words or phrases not used in their
literal sense; sometimes distinguished from figures of
speech, whose departure from ordinary speech is a matter
of order or rhetorical effect, rather than of meaning
Victorian having been produced during the reign of Queen Victoria
(1832-1901); usually realistic
voice authorial persona; speech
vorticism modernist movement in art and literature redefining the
image in more dynamic terms; a continuation of imagism
witness character who does not participate in the events told; secret
sharer


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Universitatea “Dunărea de Jos” din Galați

Departamentul pentru Învăţământ la Distanţă

,,Dunarea de Jos’’ University of Galati

MODERNISM AND THE

Modernism and the Novel in English 3

• Reading literary texts as resonant of culture and civilisation;

• Aquiring the theoretical knowledge associated with modernism as reflected in

Types of teaching activities

Its main objectives are:

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

Modernism and the Novel in English 7

8 Modernism and the Novel in English

controversial, issue. To underline the transformations having occurred

Modernism and the Novel in English 9

fluid, complex handling of time that involves much cross-referencing

10 Modernism and the Novel in English

▪ open-endedness as an invitation at excluding formal perfection

1.2. Early Modernism (James, Forster, Conrad)

Modernism and the Novel in English 11

1.3. Experimentalism (Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence)

12 Modernism and the Novel in English

sustained. The old clock ticked on within modernism’s new chronologies.

Modernism and the Novel in English 13

2.1. Henry James

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

Modernism and the Novel in English 13

His name is now associated with psychological realism, whose very

14 Modernism and the Novel in English

brought off its pedestal and the limited, subjective narrator/focaliser is

The Portrait of a Lady

One of the novels belonging to Henry James’s early period of

Modernism and the Novel in English 15

oblique, though biting, philosophy of life in the wilderness of the social

2.2. Edward Morgan Forster

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

16 Modernism and the Novel in English

Modernism and the Novel in English 17

familiar places) is embedded in it so that the notion of otherness becomes

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

18 Modernism and the Novel in English

2.3. Joseph Conrad

Modernism and the Novel in English 19

The Arrow of Gold (1919), The Rescue (1920), The Rover

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

20 Modernism and the Novel in English

commas and double inverted commas to suggest the juxtaposition of the

Inspired by a voyage that Conrad took on the Congo around the

Modernism and the Novel in English 21

since it brings about a symbolical contamination and exchange: Kurtz’s life

2.4. Virginia Woolf

22 Modernism and the Novel in English

(1942), The Moment (1947), The Captain’s Death Bed (1950),

A member of the Bloomsbury Group (together with Clive Bell – art

Modernism and the Novel in English 23

Her novels may also be described as autobiographical, in the sense that

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

24 Modernism and the Novel in English

In flight from the object world ‘objectively’ portrayed, Mrs. Dalloway

Modernism and the Novel in English 25

2.5. James Joyce

26 Modernism and the Novel in English

Joyce’s writing has developed gradually, to reach its climactic point in

A novel emblematic for the twentieth century, Ulysses anchors the