Publisher's Synopsis
In this study of the 20th century English language novel the author shows how modernist experiments in form have intensified the vision of social experience in the novels of Lawrence, Joyce, Faulkner, Barnes, Hemingway, Lowry and Ellison. He demonstrates through detailed textual criticism, how all of them have responded to the same crisis of values in the West which preoccupied Freud and Heidegger. Their fictions at once confirm and challenge the legacy of these thinkers through a unique genre, the epiphanous novel. Here, the dominant structures of feeling in 19th century fiction - passion and compassion - are eclipsed by the more forbidding structures of absence and desire.;John Orr is the author of "Tragic Realism and Modern Society" and "Tragic Drama and Modern Society".
