A01=Harold Kaplan
Agnostic
Author_Harold Kaplan
bovary
Category=QD
character motivation analysis
Conrad's Work
Conrad’s Work
consciousness studies
Dead Man
dedalus
emma
Emma Bovary
Emma's Consciousness
Emma’s Consciousness
epistemological crisis
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
Faulkner's Work
Faulkner’s Work
Hemingway Hero
Hemingway's Work
Hemingway’s Work
Human Suffering
individualism in twentieth century novels
Ivy Day
Jim's Death
Jim’s Death
Joanna Burden
Joe Christmas
Kaplan Harold
Lawrence's Writing
Lawrence’s Writing
Lena Grove
Leopold Bloom
literary modernism
Madame Bovary
Maximum Consciousness
Modern Fiction
narrative agency
Natural Crime
naturalism in literature
Passive Agent
Quentin Compson
stephen
Stephen Dedalus
Superb
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9781412811361
- Weight: 317g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Nov 2010
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In The Solipsism of Modern Fiction, Harold Kaplan deals with the problem of action and its adequate motive in the modern novel. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries modern scientific knowledge abandoned the human-centered view of the universe and thus the fictional modes that had been rooted in religion or myth. The result for fiction was a radical skepticism on the part of the protagonist who now appeared as a reflective, self-critical, passive figure lacking the dynamism of the epic hero or religious seeker.One response to the scientific worldview was the naturalism of Zola and his followers in which the action of characters is determined by social or biological forces. Kaplan, however, focuses his study on such novelists as Flaubert, Joyce, Conrad, Faulkner, Lawrence, and Hemingway who dramatized the isolated individual consciousness in contention with the world and with the ambiguity of their own motivations.The Solipsism of Modern Fiction deals with several related topics that grow from one source, the crisis of knowledge in modern intellectual history. The effects of solipsism and of moral passivity, the split consciousness that divides action and understanding, the perspectives of primitive naturalism and stoic naturalism, the variations of the comic mood, and the example of tragedy, are all themes that are dramatized in Kaplan's readings of Madame Bovary, Light in August, Ulysses, Lord Jim, and other exemplary modern novels that associate themselves with the problem of self-criticism, knowing, and acting. Written by one of the outstanding literary scholars of our time, this book will inspire new generations of readers and writers.
