AN INTRODUCTION TO THE MODERNIST NOVEL

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.

Springtime for Ulysses

Why did Mel Brooks name one of the main characters in The Producers (1967) after James Joyce's Leopold Bloom? Tracing the meanings of that name over the course of a half century, from Joyce's Ulysses (1922) to the stage adaptation Ulysses in Nighttown (1958) to Brooks's film, illuminates how the landmark modernist novel not only acquired outsize significance for American Jewish readers but in fact became a Jewish text. Having affiliated itself with highbrow Joycean modernism in a bid for respectability, Jewish culture discovered in the source of that respectability something not so highbrow and hardly respectable at all: an enjoyable perversity rooted in popular comic performance. The Jewish form and content of both Ulysses and The Producers turn out to celebrate ethnic, racial, sexual, and class difference in defiance of Christian norms of taste, health, and citizenship; and it is in Brooks's popular citation of the literary that this defiance becomes visible.

Self-Identification of the character in the modernist novel by Lena Etlang «Pobeg kumaniki»

Lena Eltangs novel Pobeg kumaniki (Escape (Sprout) of the Brambles) is interpreted as a modern modernist prose that inherits the principles of the poetics of the stream of consciousness literature. The theoretical and methodological basis of the study was the work of A.A. Zhitenev, Ya.V. Soldatkina, N.T. Rymar, T.L. Rybalchenko.The self-identification of the main character in the novel by Lena Etlang Pobeg Kumaniki is complicated because of the absence of external supports of existence (home, communication with relatives, the name given to him at birth is not mentioned). Moras defines himself as a guest and a ubiquist, that is, a person who can exist in different conditions, but this does not answer the question Who am I?. The second thing that complicates self-identification is the inability to relate yourself to any particular Other (both in culture and in the environment), since situationally there are contradictory auto-associations with a variety of images from mythology and literature. The third challenge is the desire to combine not only different, but opposite (male and female, and depraved innocent, naive and wise, etc.). Pragmatism and the multidimensionality of identity, the desire to realize in my life more options (which gives the writing, creation of the text itself as others) that make the process of identity complex and unfinished. Another reason for the difficulty of identifying oneself is the limited epistemological possibilities and the inability of a person to take a position of non-necessity in order to see himself holistically. Eltang uses the Eastern parable of the cart, which illustrates the inability of a person to describe anything holistically, authentic to the essence of the described phenomenon. The main artistic principle of image-building in the novel is ambivalence, and the basic ideas are the multiplicity of consciousness and the incompleteness of a persons self-identification in the course of life.

Cleft Construction Is a Salient Feature in the ‘City of Glass’ a Novel by Paul Auster: A Stylistic Study

The present study is an attempt to investigate using the grammatical devices of cleft construction as a stylistic feature in the ‘city of Glass’ a post-modernist novel by Paul Auster. The purpose behind using cleft sentence is to highlight the element which is a part of the sentence and it is important for the author’s perspective. The construction of cleft sentence composes of a matrix clause headed by copula and relative or relative-like clause. Both (matrix and relative) reflect a simple logical proposal, That could’ve been conveyed in the consisting of a specific attribute without changing the truth circumstances. So this structure allows the writer focusing on the important element that he /she believes to reveal the creative use of language.

The Burial of the Dead in Mann’s The Magic Mountain

During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, readers of modernist literature have often been reminded of the flu epidemic of 1918-1920. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) anatomizes pre-war bourgeois society as represented by the inmates of a tuberculosis asylum in Davos, Switzerland. The novel typifies a concern in modernist fiction with the proper rites for the burial of the dead, which I explored in an earlier study, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. This essay argues that that Mann sees the novel, as a genre, as having a particular ability to represent the process of mourning because of its powers of ironic distancing: it can represent both the public ritual of the funeral service and the private thoughts of the mourner, which may or may not accord with official sentiment. More generally, the modern novel shows how we project our own desires and fears onto the dead.

Mortal Form

This chapter analyzes Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927). It diverges from the critical commonplace that aligns the form of To the Lighthouse with Lily Briscoe's painting and claims instead that the novel unfolds the iconographic implications of a still-life composition. The carefully arranged dish of fruit and a seashell on the Ramsays' table signals the novel's interest in minor, everyday objects and also establishes a vanitas motif—a reminder of mortality and the impermanence of human life. Woolf's still life metamorphoses into various vanitas forms throughout the novel, precipitating later turns of the plot and linking up with the novel's elegiac project. All these vanitas motifs are thus mortal forms that help to determine the shape and flow of the narrative, which is itself a mortal form—hopelessly entangled with human emotion, fated to reckon with mortality, and challenged to mourn the dead. In this way Woolf, like James, requires one to modify the notion that the modernist novel is best approached as a spatial form.

Paratextual Adaptation of Social Importance for Three Groundbreaking Scandinavian Novels

To sell a novel as socially relevant, the book cover, prefaces, and other paratext can help convey why readers should care and how the story should be read. But relevance can expire as society moves on. Reprints of groundbreaking classics that no longer engage contemporary concerns adapt their paratext to reach new readers, often by emphasizing the book’s historical and/or literary position. This article examines paratextual strategies across time and space for three Scandinavian novels with exceptional influence. Enlightenment-promoting Niels Klim’s Underground Travels (1741) was the region’s first novel; Hunger (1890) is praised by many as the world’s first modernist novel; and The Man on the Balcony (1967) became the progenitor of Nordic Noir. Early paratext used anonymity, false veracity, or documentary elements to sell relevance. But with commercial success, and temporal and geographical distance, paratext became increasingly author focused and self-referential, at times all but ignoring the author’s intent for the story.