What Was the Modern Novel?

Abstract

In the autumn of 1937 I gave up a research fellowship at Balliol College, Oxford, to accept an invitation to teach at the University of Chicago. On arrival at Chicago I discovered that among other things I was expected to give a course in Contemporary British Literature, then an unfamiliar phrase to me, especially in a university context. We did not at that time include twentieth-century literature in the curriculum of British universities, but I had read a certain amount, especially of modern English fiction, and had published the previous year (when I was twentythree) a book of essays entitled New Literary Values, which included studies of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wilfred Owen, Katherine Mansfield, and Joyce's Ulysses. I had become fascinated by Joyce when I first managed to get hold of a copy of Ulysses in 1935, though it was still banned in Britain. At the same time as I was reading Joyce I was reading Virginia Woolf, of whom I had known nothing until Louis Cazamian came from Paris in 1933 to lecture at Edinburgh University (where I was then an undergraduate) on Mrs. Dalloway. That novel also fascinated me, and it was thinking about it and Ulysses that led me to see in some features they seemed to have in common the germ of a possible theory of the distinctive features of the modern novel. My special period at Edinburgh University had been the seventeenth century; my doctoral dissertation at Oxford was on sixteenthand seventeenth-century English Bible translation; but at an early stage I had formed the habit of seeking refreshment in the midst of these earlier studies by reading and making critical notes on works of modern literature.