In the Company of Strangers Quotes

“But in the genealogical plots of Dickens, which manage, against all the odds, and through extravagantly implausible coincidences, to work themselves out against the hostile background of the vast London crowds, we can identify the same narratological problem to which Joyce and Proust seek a queer structural solution: the competition for control of the narrative between the genealogical family and alternative forms of human connections.”
― Barry McCrea, In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust

“But modernism remains deeply curious about the family; like their contemporaries Freud and Woolf, Joyce and Proust in fact intensify the focus on the life of the bourgeois nuclear family. What the modernists do break with, though, are the plots of marriage and paternity that had become almost standard in the English nineteenth-century novel.”
― Barry McCrea, In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust