| This dissertation is a comparative study of the family novel as a distinct literary genre. I concentrate on three family novels that I consider prototypical--the Chinese three-volume work The Turbulent Trilogy, Family, Spring, Autumn, by Pa Chin (1906-1940); the British trilogy The Forsyte Saga, The Man of Property, In Chancery, To Let, by John Galsworthy (1906-1922); and the French family novel, Les Thibauts (1922-1940) by Roger Martin du Gard.;I define the family novel as a sub-genre of the novel by describing the distinctive characteristics: its realism and use of chronology; its sense of ritual and community; and the centrality of family conflict. The ways these three traits are handled in the family novel make it different from other kinds of novels. My dissertation also discusses the conflicts between the older and younger generations, as well as those deriving from the failure of love, both of which form the basic plots and themes of these works. The rise and decline of the family in the social-political sense also helps shape the primary narrative and structural patterns. The roughly simultaneous occurrence of these family novels in different parts of the world during the early twentieth-century suggests a relationship between novel as a form and modernistic concerns. The decline and disintegration of the families involved suggest symbolically the loss of the Old World and its sense of order--its faiths, conventions, and values. The psychological and individual development of sons signals the transition into the modern world. The inner structure of the family novel, which, I believe, is based on the opposition between the power of the clan and the will of the individual as well as between the old and new operates as form's dynamic force and explains the structural parallels in family novels and its universality.;Finally, I argue that the family novel, which ripened into an independent genre at the beginning of the twentieth century, is still moving forward in contemporary times. The flourishing of family novels all over the world makes it imperative to open up for investigation the new generic category of the family novel. |
