Victorian/Modern Comparison by Melba Cuddy-Keane
Victorian/Modern Comparison
by Dr. Melba Cuddy-Keane
An exercise in relational definition:
Early comparisons between the Victorian novel and the modernist novel set up the following binaries: (Compare the later binary oppositions posited between the modernism and postmodernism. How does the nature of the modernist novel “flip,” depending on the form to which it is being compared?)
Victorian/Edwardian | Modernist |
Alan Friedman: | |
structure of a ladder self in relation to social world |
structure of a cobweb private self as generative source of fictions |
José Ortega Y Gasset: |
|
art of adventures realism humanized representation |
art of figures game or delightful fraud |
John Fletcher and Malcolm Bradbury: |
|
mimetic material realism |
autotelic introversion |
Alan Friedman: |
|
closed form resolution |
open form endlessness; ongoing flux of experience |
James Gindin: |
|
centrally coherent focus
formal, moral or theological absolutes metaphysical truth fable; myth |
tradition of compassion (1875- ) inconclusive; partially conclusive denial of formal, moral, or theological absolutes sense of history or social process rather than metaphysical truth fiction negotiates with experience of reader |
References:
1. Alan Friedman, “The Novel,” The Twentieth-Century Mind: History, Ideas, and Literature in Britain, 1: 1900-1918, ed. C.B. Cox and A.E. Dyson (London: Oxford University Press, 1972). 414-46.
2. José Ortega Y Gasset, “Notes on the Novel,” The Dehumanization of Art and Notes on the Novel, trans. Helen Weyl (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948). 57-103.
3. John Fletcher and Malcolm Bradbury, “The Introverted Novel,” Modernism 1890-1930, eds. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, (Harmondsworth; New York: Penguin, 1976). 394-415.
4. Alan Friedman, The Turn of the Novel (London: Oxford University Press, 1966).
5. James Gindin, Harvest of a Quiet Eye: The Novel of Compassion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971).
Many thanks to Dr. Melba Cuddy-Keane, Professor of English at the University of Toronto, for graciously allowing us to reproduce this page. You can find the original, along with a link to a modernism/postmodernism comparison, at her website:
http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~mcuddy/ENG5520Y/vict-mod.htm
This article is reprinted here for educational purposes, with the permission of the author who retains copyright to this work.