Modern English Fiction : A Bird's Eye View

Preface

Fiction broadly refers to any narrative that is derived from the imagination-in other words, not based strictly on history or fact. It can also refer, more narrowly, to narratives written only in prose (the novel and short story), and is often used as a synonym for the novel. In cinema it corresponds to narrative film in opposition to documentary as far as novelto feature film and short story to short film.

The English novel is an important part of English literature. This article mainly concerns novels, written in English, by novelists who were born or have spent a significant part of their lives in England, or Scotland, or Wales, or Northern Ireland (or Ireland before 1922). However, given the nature of the subject, this guide-line has been applied with common sense, and reference is made to novels in other languages or novelists who are not prima rily British where appropriate major novelists writing in Britain at the start of the 20th century were an Irishman James Joyce (1882 1941) and two immigrants, American Henry James (1843-1916) and Pole Joseph Conrad (1857-1924). The modernist tradition in the novel, with its emphasis "towards the ever more minute and analytic ex-position of mental life", begins with James and Conrad, in novels such as The Ambassadors (1903), The Golden Bowl (1907) and Lord Jim (1900). Other important early modernists were Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957), whose novel Pointed Roof (1915), is one of the earliest example of the stream of consciousness technique and D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), who wrote with understanding about the social life of the lower and middle classes, and the personal life of those who could not adapt to the social norms of his time. Sons and Lovers (1913), is widelyregardedas his earliest mas erpiece. There followed The Rainbow (1915), though it was im-mediately seized by the police, and its sequel Women in Love pub-lished in 1920 Lawrence attempted to explore human emotions more deeply than his contemporaries and challenged the boundaries of the acceptable treatment of sexual issues, most notably in Lady Chatterley's Lover, which was privately published in Florence in 1928. However, the unexpurgated version of this novel was not published until 1959. Then in 1922 Irishman James Joyce's important modernist novel Ulysses appeared.

Dr. Keyur K. Parekh