Nowhere is the sense of medium felt more strongly, even by the casual reader, than in a story about to end. For the novelist the problem is no longer how to tell his tale, but how to close it down; how to switch imaginative energies which have been used in sustaining the tale, into energies which will not just stop it, but will resolve it. The process of telling must be made to predicate its
own conclusion. For the reader, in sight of an ending, the mode of attention shifts, the rhythm alters, and a pressure of significance begins to build up behind the closing chapters. The pace of the narrative begins to slow, the 'ever after' looms, past and present emerge in ever sharper juxtaposition. It is this heightened attention
to the medium that characterises the ending and we are not surprised to find that for some novelists 'endings' seem to play false to the narrative which leads to them. 'Conclusions are the weak points of most authors', George Eliot wrote, 'but some of the fault must lie in the very nature of a conclusion which is at best a negation'.
Tags: literary-criticism
Wuthering Heights, however it may appear in retrospect,
demands a reading of the utmost intensity, the feeling present in the writing seems to seek a matching response in the reading. If we turn from the story that Emily Brontë tells to the kind of story that Hardy tells, we find a markedly different kind of reader being called into being, a reader who is to be drawn not so much into an intensity of response, but rather into a continual oscillation between
intensity of involvement and contemplative detachment
Tags: literary-criticism
Indeed, and crucially so, the serial form took
the control of the novel away from the reader and left him in an imagined space that could not be thought of in terms of the physical space still to be read. At the end of each instalment the reader would contemplate a vacuum, an 'end' which looked forward to a continuing verbal space which he could not measure.
He might speculate but he could not know.
Tags: literary-criticism
Length, I want to suggest, has a peculiar significance for the reader of a Victorian novel and especially so if we are concerned with an awareness of it as a book; a physical object held in the hand...
The distinctive achievement of novels like Bleak House and Middlemarch is an expanding density and complexity towards the creation of a realised and felt fictional
world. Their imaginative breadth demands both a spatial freedom and temporal capacity equal to the creative intention...
The Victorian novel, then, assumes through its length the possibility of a completed and enclosed fictional world. The reading experience, through a linear and sequential development will be, quite obviously, distinct from, say Ulysses or Finnegans Wake.
It is what Josipovici has called the 'swelling continuity' of Victorian narrative, a form which encourages a particular kind of reading response:
Reading an intricately plotted nineteenth-century novel is very much like travelling by train. Once one has paid for one's ticket and found one's seat one can settle down in comfort and forget all everyday worries until one reaches one's destination, secure that one is in good hands
Tags: literary-criticism
Starting with the hypothesis that all the characters in Women in Love suffer from acute dissociation of sensibility, it becomes clear that psychological reintegration is no longer possible for them, and complete divorce between reason and emotion, mind and body, is imminent. As a result, the characters become mental or physical in basic nature and are symbolically presented accordingly.
John E. StollTags: literary-criticism
Lawrence's claims for the vital self and his inability to make it
convincing independently of Freudian psychology are serious flaws in the novel, explain the sense in which the author's vision exceeds his grasp, and bring the cleavage between intention and performance into clear perspective.
Tags: literary-criticism
He was more aware than is usually admitted of the Freudian implications in the novel, and the note of ambiguity could have insinuated itself at least as a partial effort to conceal the radical thesis and the problem of form. Since this is exactly what happens in Lady Chatterley's Lover, the hypothesis is not without possibilities.
John E. StollTags: literary-criticism
In the context of Lawrence's rejection of the Freudian notion of incest and the close identification between author and character, Sons and Lovers becomes an exercise in deliberate ambiguity.
John E. StollTags: literary-criticism
In summing up Lawrence's earlier novels and in anticipating the later, Sons and Lovers is of central importance to the whole Lawrence canon because it contains the psychological basis of much of the later doctrine.
John E. StollTags: literary-criticism
It must be remembered that no art lives by nature, only by acts of voluntary attention on the part of human individuals. When these are not made it ceases to exist.
C.S. LewisTags: literary-criticism
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