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.
Identity, Fidelity, and Cross-Cultural Relationships in Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly