Gnostic romance: Dickens, Conrad and the advent of modernism

Romance's permutations in nascent modernist texts validate the imaginative and psychic function of the genre, and establish the social import of its literary expressions. More than mere "fantasy" or "gothic," romance is a permanent imaginative response to social change and disorder. These threats to social stability endanger not only power, as Marxists have claimed, but also the social coherence on which individual identity and meaning depend. Thus the desire for collective coherence frequently expresses itself in terms of ideal individual behavior. The 'best self', determined by communal values, in turn makes possible a collective whose identity and structures of meaning can remain imaginatively intact.;Our Mutual Friend reveals Dickensian romance's central characteristics: the essentially narrative and dialectic structure of its role in human experience; its potential for subverting authority and creating change; its power to create a coherent community in opposition to the dominant culture.;Conrad extends these features into the twentieth century, creating a fully-gnostic romance which acknowledges the impossibility of achieving its utopian aims. Confronted with alienation, an indifferent universe, and the indeterminacy of language and experience, Conrad faces a world generally agreed to be the ground of modern fiction. In Lord Jim, his paradigmatic modern novel, these communal, existential and epistemological crises converge on the idealist's vision. Modernist romance results. This novel imagines the possible ideal recovery of both certainty and community, acknowledges the necessary failure implied in those projections, and yet endows the "struggle of contradictions" with the "dignity of moral strife."...