Theorists of the Modernist Novel: James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf

Deborah PARSONS, Theorists of the Modernist Novel: James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf

Routledge (Series : Routledge Critical Thinkers), 2006, 176 p.

ISBN : 9780415285421

Tracing the developing modernist aesthetic in the thought and writings of James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, Deborah Parsons considers the cultural, social and personal influences upon the three writers. Exploring the connections between their theories, Parsons pays particular attention to their work on:

• forms of realism
• characters and consciousness
• gender and the novel
• time and history.

An understanding of these three thinkers is fundamental to a grasp on modernism, making this an indispensable guide for students of modernist thought. It is also essential reading for those who wish to understand debates about the genre of the novel or the nature of literary expression, which were given a new impetus by the pioneering figures of Joyce, Richardson and Woolf.

TABLE OF CONTENTS :

Why Joyce, Woolf and Richardson?  Pioneers.  Modernism and the Novel 

1. A New Realism.  Realism and Reality.  Romanticism, Realism and Impressionism.  Drama and Life.  Myth and the Modern.  Modern Novels 

2. Character and Consciousness.  The Stream of Consciousness.  A Modern Hero.  Looking for 'Mrs Brown'.  Multiple Selves 

3. Gender and the Novel.  A Room of One’s Own.  A Female Literary Heritage.  Tradition.  Feminine Sentences.  The Sentence of Feminine Gender  The Eternal Feminine and the Womanly Woman.  Literary Androgyny 

4. Time and History.  The Relation of Time and Space.  'Spacetime'.  Prehistory and Cultural Memory. After Joyce.  Further Reading.  Works Cited