AN INTRODUCTION TO THE MODERNIST NOVEL

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nataša Tučev

This book is intended as an introduction to the modernist novel, primarily for the students and scholars of the English language and literature. Four major novelists – Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf – have been chosen to exemplify the stylistic features, aesthetic preoccupations and thematic concerns of the works of fiction written in English in the early decades of the twentieth century. The methodological principle used in this study is multilevel. First, these four authors are analysed by referring to their essays, philosophical treatises, prefaces to their novels and other nonfictional works where they define their poetics and their artistic goals in their own terms. After this, since form is such a major concern of the modernist novel, formal innovations and narrative strategies of each of these authors are discussed at some length. Finally, a single novel is chosen to represent each author, and it is analysed in detail. Heart of Darkness, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Mrs Dalloway are widely recognized within the oeuvre of these novelists as some of their greatest artistic achievements. Lawrence’s novella St Mawr is a lesser-known work; however, I would argue that F. R. Leavis’s praise of this short piece as “an astonishing work of genius” still stands. The same as with the other three novels, its inclusion in the study is justified by the valuable insights it provides about the characteristics of modernist fiction and modernist art in general.

Author(s):  
Karol Samsel ◽  

The article attempts to extend the existing Polish-language research on the semantics of silence in Joseph Conrad’s works, and to interpret this semantics, in the view of the Polish literary tradition, to which Conrad indicated his debt subtly but quite unambiguously (e.g. in an interview with Marian Dąbrowski from 1914). The author highlights the perspective of the so-called Ukrainian school in the Polish Romantic Literature, suggesting that it was from this imagination (more than from Mickiewicz’s) that the author of Almayer’s Folly could adopt specific figures: “the cosmic night” and “the ontological silence”. It is visible both in the construction of events (Nostromo, Almayer’s Folly, The Shadow-Line) and in the narrative strategies (Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Chance).


Author(s):  
Harrington Weihl

One of the major literary figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Henry James was one of the foremost English-language practitioners of literary realism at its height, and was one of the most influential novelists among the modernists that followed him, receiving praise and admiration from T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, and others. His novel Portrait of A Lady and novellas Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw are among his most widely read, and in The Spoils of Poynton he made some of the first forays into the complexity and depth that would later characterize modernism. Also an accomplished travel writer and memoirist, James's produced literary criticism that is considered some of the deepest and most detailed work on theorizing the English-language novel before the twentieth century. Born in the United States and spending much of his adult life in Britain, James is a transatlantic figure whose influence has been so great as to posthumously justify his nickname of Master.


This research article highlights the temperament, inference, scope, and motives of code-mixing in Pakistani English works. One novel from Pakistani English novels namely, An American Brat by Bapsi Sidhwa, and one short story namely, The Escape by Qaisra Shehraz are being selected as an illustration of this reading. In this novel and short story, the writers have already dealt with the characteristics of postcolonialism. English language and literature pierced into the privileged civilizations of the sub-continent, after the end of British Imperialism. Pakistani writers in English are the best interpreter of the post-colonial communal language. In this study, I have hit upon code-mixing in English works written by Pakistani authors to a bigger echelon. These works are paragons of arts and the unbelievable mixture of rhetorical and fictitious study. In these works, the writers have not abased the confined diversities. They have tinted the value of Pakistani English in order to achieve the chatty desires of native people. These borrowings from the native languages are used to fill the lexical fissures of ideological thoughts. The reason of these borrowings is not to represent the English as a substandard assortment. Through the utilization of native words, we conclude that the significance of native languages has been tinted to question mark the dialect as well. The words of daily use also have an area of research for English people without having any substitute in English. That’s why in English literature innovative practices and ideas of code-mixing have been employed.


This research article highlights the temperament, inference, scope, and motives of code-mixing in Pakistani English works. One novel from Pakistani English novels namely, An American Brat by Bapsi Sidhwa, and one short story namely, The Escape by Qaisra Shehraz are being selected as an illustration of this reading. In this novel and short story, the writers have already dealt with the characteristics of postcolonialism. English language and literature pierced into the privileged civilizations of the sub-continent, after the end of British Imperialism. Pakistani writers in English are the best interpreter of the post-colonial communal language. In this study, I have hit upon code-mixing in English works written by Pakistani authors to a bigger echelon. These works are paragons of arts and the unbelievable mixture of rhetorical and fictitious study. In these works, the writers have not abased the confined diversities. They have tinted the value of Pakistani English in order to achieve the chatty desires of native people. These borrowings from the native languages are used to fill the lexical fissures of ideological thoughts. The reason for these borrowings is not to represent the English as a substandard assortment. Through the utilization of native words, we conclude that the significance of native languages has been tinted to question mark the dialect as well. The words of daily use also have an area of research for English people without having any substitute in English. That’s why in English literature innovative practices and ideas of code-mixing have been employed.


2014 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernice Schrank

This essay examines the political uses to which Behan puts language in his autobiographical fiction, Borstal Boy, both as an instrument of domination and a means of liberation. Identifying Standard English language and literature as important components of the British imperial project, Behan creates, as a linguistic alternative, ‘englishes’, a composite language in which differences of geography, class, age, education, and occupation create a demotic speech of great variability and expressive force. In so doing, Behan sabotages the cultural assumptions and justifications for colonial exploitation embedded and validated in Standard English literature and language.


Author(s):  
Tamara Wagner

This chapter looks at the representations of the former British Straits Settlements in English fiction from 1819 to 1950, discussing both British literary works that are located in South East Asia and English-language novels from Singapore and Malaysia. Although over the centuries, Europeans of various nationalities had located, intermarried, and established unique cultures throughout the region, writing in the English language at first remained confined to travel accounts, histories, and some largely anecdotal fiction, mostly by civil servants. English East India Company employees wrote about the region, often weaving anecdotal sketches into their historical, geographical, and cultural descriptions. Civil servant Hugh Clifford and Joseph Conrad are the two most prominent writers of fiction set in the British Straits Settlements during the nineteenth century; they also epitomize two opposing camps in representing the region.


PMLA ◽  
1962 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-212
Author(s):  
Charles C. Mish ◽  
Mervin R. Lowe ◽  
Robert M. Pierson ◽  
Gordon Ross Smith ◽  
Sherod M. Cooper ◽  
...  

PMLA ◽  
1925 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-43
Author(s):  
Albert C. Baugh ◽  
Norman Foerster ◽  
H. Carrington Lancaster ◽  
J. P. Wickersham Crawford ◽  
Daniel B. Shumway

Members of the Association are requested to see that copies of monographs, studies or dissertations in the field of the Modern Languages which may appear in University series during the current year be sent to the editor of the appropriate section of the American Bibliography.


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