The modernist novel

de Stephen Kern

"Leading scholar Stephen Kern offers a probing analysis of the modernist novel, encompassing American, British and European works. Organized thematically, the book offers a comprehensive analysis of the stunningly original formal innovations in novels by Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Proust, Gide, Faulkner, Dos Passos, Kafka, Musil and others. Kern contextualizes and explains how formal innovations captured the dynamic history of the period, reconstructed as ten master narratives. He also draws briefly on poetry and painting of the first half of the twentieth century. The Modernist Novel is set to become a fundamental source for discussions of the genre and a useful introduction to the subject for students and scholars of modernism and twentieth-century literature"-- "The period 1900-1940 produced revolutionary developments in science and the arts. The rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's laws of heredity in 1900 undercut the popular notion that the values and character traits of parents blend in offspring and are transmitted directly to them. In The Interpretation of Dreams of 1900 Sigmund Freud laid the foundation for his theory of the mind as a network of unconscious processes and the residue of childhood psychosexual experience. Also in 1900, the introduction of Planck's constant to explain the spectra of radiating bodies was the first blow to classical physics, leading to a major elaboration of quantum theory by 1927. Most unsettling was the theory's indeterminacy principle, which put knowledge of subatomic events on a probabilistic basis, thereby limiting the sort of deterministic causal knowledge that classical physics had posited throughout the universe. Albert Einstein's special relativity theory of 1905 maintained that space and time are not absolute and distinct but transform into one another. In 1908 Arnold Schoenberg composed music in no single tonal system, while in 1911 Wassily Kandinsky painted no recognizable objects. No single literary change was as revolutionary as these others. However, the sum of formal innovations in the novel was revolutionary in providing new ways of rendering how people experience personal development, courtship conventions, family relations, urban life, national identification, imperial conquest, capitalist enterprise, liberal institutions, religious faith, and artistic creativity"--