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In this groundbreaking and comprehensive study, Julian Murphet examines how dramatists and prose writers at the turn of the twentieth century experimented with new forms of modern character. Old truisms of character such as consistency, depth, and verisimilitude are eschewed in favour of inconsistency, bad faith, and fragmentation.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Part One
- 1: Ibsen
- 2: Maeterlinck
- 3: Strindberg
- 4: Chekhov
- Part Two
- 5: Wilde and Huysmans
- 6: D'Annunzio
- 7: Henry James
- 8: Knut Hamsun
- 9: Egerton
- 10: Chopin and Wharton
- 11: Conrad
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Julian Murphet is Jury Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Adelaide. Prior to that he was Scientia Professor of Modern Film and Literature at UNSW, Sydney. He has previously worked at the Universities of Sydney, Oxford, Cambridge, and California at Berkeley.
Summary
How was modern character made or remade at the turn of the twentieth century? Modern Character: 1888-1905 considers a range of literary and dramatic texts, showcasing the extraordinary efforts of various writers to rethink and reinvent 'human character' during this period. Arguing that many of the most significant breakthroughs happened in the small theatres of Europe in the 1890s, the book's first section demonstrates how the countervailing currents of Naturalism and Symbolism created a vortex in which time-honoured truisms about character consistency, depth, and verisimilitude were jettisoned. Works by Ibsen, Strindberg, Maeterlinck, and Chekhov provide evidence of a searching and critical campaign against assumed models of characterization.
The second section turns to contemporary prose narratives, with attention to Knut Hamsun, Oscar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Henry James, George Egerton, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, and Joseph Conrad, to ask what writers working in the novel, novella, and short-story forms were doing to contest prevailing expectations about represented persons. Inconsistency, bad faith, fragmentation, and unconscious motives creep into the character spaces of these fictions. Character description recedes and plots disintegrate; a penumbral negativity intrudes just where identification and sympathy might have been achieved.
Ultimately, Julian Murphet proposes that the 'modern character' emerging over this decade and a half presents a radical rethinking of a venerable category of narrative and dramatic art, with profound consequences for the coming century.
Additional text
This meticulously researched book reveals how between the years 1888 and 1905 a small group of writers transformed the long-held notion of literary "character" as a moral agent and object of identification.
