Novel Practices: Classic Modern Fiction

by Goodheart,Eugene

• ISBN13: 9780765802088
• ISBN10: 0765802082
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-10-31
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

An important debate in modern literary criticism concents the exact relationship between the ancient epic and the novel. Both the epic and the most ambitious modern novels are large-scale attempts to present a comprehensive view of the world through the experience of a representative hero. However, in the older tradition the hero stood for the aspirations and highest ideals of his society. The protagonist of the modem novel is usually at odds with that society, whether as exile, active rebel, or antagonistic critic. "In Novel. Practices, the distinguished literary scholar Eugene Goodheart surveys a representative selection of modern novelists tracing how the epic impulse has been reshaped under the conditions of modernity. Goodheart describes how George Eliot and James Joyce's comprehensive artistic creation enabled them to demonstrate a mastery of the world unattainable to their thwarted, flawed, or feckless heroes and heroines. Works such as "Middlemarch and "Ulysses, encyclopedic their inclusiveness, share an ambitious scope that is virtually synonymous with epic. Goodheart shows that even in shorter works, such as James's "The Bea

Author Biography

Eugene Goodheart is Edytha Macy Gross Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Brandeis University

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
1. "The Licensed Trespasser": The Omniscient Narrator in Middlemarch	1	(14)
2. Joyce and the Common Life	15	(16)
3. Thomas Mann's Comic Spirit	31	(14)
4. The Art of Ambivalence: The Good Soldier	45	(10)
5. What May Knew in The Beast in the Jungle	55	(10)
6. Leon Edel's Henry James	65	(16)
7. Censorship and Self-Censorship in the Fiction of D.H. Lawrence	81	(18)
8. Lawrence and American Fiction	99	(22)
9. "Sex Consciousness" and the Novel: A Room of One's Own	121	(12)
10. A Contest of Motives: T.E. Lawrence in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom	133	(14)
11. Character in Saul Bellow's Novels	147	(14)
12. Counterlives: Philip Roth in Autobiography and Fiction	161	(14)
13. Four Decades of Contemporary American Fiction	175	(24)
14. Recent Novels	199	(10)
Index	209