Towards a Definition of the 'long modernist novel'. Issue 3 (November 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Bell, Michael
• Is Part Of: Modernist cultures. Volume 10:Issue 3(2015)
• Page Start: 282
• Page End: 298
• Publication Date: 2015-11
• Subjects: genre -- aesthetic -- myth -- history -- time; Arts, Modern -- Periodicals; Civilization, Modern -- Periodicals; Modernism (Aesthetics) -- Periodicals; 700.904
• DOI: 10.3366/mod.2015.0115
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2041-1022

Abstract

Abstract : This paper considers a number of long fictions from the modernist period to see how far their length serves specifically modernist concerns, especially temporality and history. Various extended narratives suit modernist aesthetic mythopoeia for which Nietzsche's essay on The Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life provides a philosophical articulation. Joyce's Ulysses, Proust's A la recherche, and Mann's Joseph and his Brothers (along with Lawrence's The Rainbow and Women in Love ) are the principal works compared and contrasted. But there are authors who stand apart from these encompassing, if not to say masterful, mythopoeic visions. Musil's unfinished Man without Qualities resists the modes of resolution which in several of the former instances have a strongly masculinist inflection. So too, to a significant extent, does Lawrence with his strongly feminine sensibility. Above all, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, while engaging with similar concerns, constitute a critical outside to the mythopoeic grouping.