Narrative personae and desire in modernist fiction /
A detailed reading of narrative fiction reveals a depersonalization intrinsic to certain modes of narration - modes that paradoxically serve the closer rendering of interiority and desire. Thus, some of the most radical moments in modernist fiction - which present what Virginia Woolf calls "the...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Oxford :
Oxford University Press,
[2025]
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | A detailed reading of narrative fiction reveals a depersonalization intrinsic to certain modes of narration - modes that paradoxically serve the closer rendering of interiority and desire. Thus, some of the most radical moments in modernist fiction - which present what Virginia Woolf calls "the world seen without a self" - are nevertheless continuous with a tradition in the novel genre dedicated to the mapping of interiority. Inspired by linguistic analyses of the "speakerless sentences" of narrative language and their unoccupied centers of perception, this book argues that modernist texts are populated by quasi-persons: narrative "voices" that are impersonal while yet trailing effects of personality, and characters whose personhood is suspended, the incisive rendering of psychology and desire produced, paradoxically, by externalizations of consciousness. Thus, certain first-person texts highlight the constitutive tension between the functions of narrator and character joined in that first person, while in third-person texts a charismatic or impervious central voice can be shown nevertheless to "hold" the psychologies it empties from the characters it describes. At stake is the particular way that modernist narrative responds to the question - critical and literary-historical, but a broader one, too - of literature's capacities for addressing psychic life. In Woolf's Jacob's Room, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples, Ronald Firbank's Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, and James Purdy's Mourners Below the book finds a paradoxical merger, a humanizing effect achieved by narrative depersonalization and its evocations of psychology and desire. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource : illustrations. |
| Audience: | Specialized. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780198972532 0198972539 |