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.
