Experience in the Novel: selected papers from the English Institute

Roy Harvey Pearce

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From the Introduction: "Modern criticism has been notoriously uneasy with the novel. Indeed out of this freely admitted sense of uneasiness there have come many of the successes of our novelistic criticism: pieces in which the critic is able to ascertain and define those qualities, particularly in the modern novel, which often seem to be a sign of its having been transformed into something crucially different from what it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries....Essentially, as a good deal of recent exacting historical criticism has shown, it is a matter of the novel's being tied to the detailed, wholly absorbing sense of being in history, in society, in culture - and of being able to get out only temporarily and, as it usually develops, at one's peril." (Pearce, UC San Diego, Feb. 1968) The book compiles 6 essays on the novel. Written at a certain moment which makes them rather interesting, the essays discuss Dickens (2), Dickens and Twain (1), Goethe (1), Fitzgerald (1) and "The Person of the Maker" (1). Interesting to read when wondering what criticism is and how it has been and continues to be thought out and written. The introduction argues that novels occur within history - this collection does too.

171 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1968