Worlds of the novel: The representation of reality in the twentieth-century novel

The present study, Worlds of the Novel: The Representation of Reality in the Twentieth-Century Novel, documents the necessarily representational function of the novel form in an analysis of three novels of the twentieth-century. The first three chapters provide an articulation of the theoretical principles to be employed, while the final three chapters illustrate the implementation of these principles in the concrete examination of Maxim Gorky' s Mother, James Joyce's Ulysses and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.;Chapter one establishes the groundwork for a concept of representation by distinguishing between realism and mimesis, two concepts intermittently employed to account for literature's relationship to reality. More historically expansive than realism's identification with a specific historic setting and more stylistically varied than mimesis, representation is proffered as a concept flexible enough to account for the twentieth-century novel's varied forms and subjects of depiction in the novel. Chapter two isolates the familial generic features of the novel which assure its representational function, while chapter three establishes an understanding of literature's relationship to its circumambient socio-historic setting and the principles required for a descriptive methodology of inquiry in literary history. The final three chapters demonstrate how Maxim Gorky's Mother, James Joyce's Ulysses and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow represent the socio-cultural settings of, respectively, socialist realism, modernism and postmodernism according to the structural features of the novel.