Fiction as knowledge: The modern post-romantic novel

by John McCormick

Critics of fiction have long been aware that the romantic movement in Europe and America gave a powerful impulse to the art of fiction. The exact nature of that impulse has resisted analysis like so much associated with romanticism. In Fiction as Knowledge John McCormick reaches for precision, proposing that much of the vitality of modern fiction derives from romantic conceptions of history which make available to fiction not merely historical subject matter, but new perceptions of reality, present and past, that pervade the work of many of the greatest writers of the post-romantic period. Fiction as Knowledge supplies critical insight into the form of the novel as well as into the seven novelists under discussion.

184 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1975