Innovative trends in Thomas Wolfe's fiction

Thomas Wolfe has been usually considered a traditional writer, and Wolfe scholarship has too often lingered on the most obvious characteristics of his writing: on the self-centered and rhetorical tones of his language and on the values and methods of a regional, realistic fiction.; These characteristics are undoubtedly part of his artistic heritage, and they are meant to describe a culture well defined in space and time. Together with these aspects, though, there are others that make him deserving of a much wider cultural citizenship. In his writing, in fact, we can detect the same desire for innovation that emerges from a great part of the literature of this century.; If, on the one hand, his writing keeps a "mimetic" hold on reality, it shows on the other a new sensibility toward the most creative aspects of language itself. The use of fragmented structures, the de-emphasizing of plot, the shifting of the narrative voice, the emphasis on autobiographical references and on the "self-reflective" quality of language, are all signs of kinship between Wolfe and this body of contemporary fiction we generally refer to as "new fiction."; The aim of my study is to explore these innovative aspects of Wolfe's writing. As some critics such as Richard Kennedy, C. Hugh Holman, and Paschal Reeves have pointed out since 1971, there is a need for a critical revaluation and reorientation of Wolfe scholarship. Their claim seems to have remained so far unheard. Most of the current criticism, in fact, still fails to point out adequately the contribution of a writer who can be considered a forerunner of American "new fiction." Through his original understanding of and dealing with imaginative writing, and his constant concern about the relationship between fact and fiction, Wolfe has prepared what can be considered the "Copernican revolution" of language today, when, in Roland Barthes' words: "language is no more the direct object of an inexpressible subject{dollar}...{dollar}but the subject itself" (Roland Barthes, 1966).