Theorists of the Modernist Novel: James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf (review)

Literary guidebooks abound nowadays. Every major publisher, it seems, has a separate series created specifically for the general reader and curious student eager for a no-nonsense sourcebook. Over the past decade, Routledge has created a number of different series, all of them intended to make legendary critical thinkers from twentieth-century philosophy and literature accessible to a wider audience of non-specialists. Compact guides to Fredric Jameson, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak are all there, along with a few others organized by subject: cyberculture, film theory, modernist poetry, and the modernist novel among them.

These pocket-size volumes in the Routledge Critical Thinkers series (they rarely have more than 170 pages) are often found in a single carousel at the bookstore, with an array of brightly colored covers meant to attract the attention of passing customers. There's the lime green of Homi Bhabha, the moody purple of Theodor Adorno, the grey shades of Paul de Man, and the post-apocalyptic orange tones of Stuart Hall. One cover, one color is never enough. These guidebooks are meant to be collected, maybe even traded like baseball cards, and they have the power to brighten even the most dismal-looking bookshelf.

Deborah Parson's Theorists of the Modernist Novel: James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf is an excellent contribution to this series. In fact, while I have found over the years that these guides can be hit or miss, this one does an amazing job precisely because it manages to prepare readers without taking the sense of discovery away. There are certainly going to be the lazy ones who read introductions to the modernist novel precisely to avoid reading modernist novels, but for others, who are motivated enough to see an introduction as a point of departure, the rewards will be well worth it.

Parsons is the kind of guide you want for an introduction of this sort: clear, focused, balanced, learned, and attuned to her audience's needs. There is an energy in these pages that comes from the depth of her knowledge about the subject and her ability to convey information without getting bogged down by too many qualifications, diversions, and non-essential factoids. Scattered throughout each chapter are shaded boxes containing keywords with definitions that every reader will need at some point. Some of them are obvious, but there are others here—"angel in the house," "moments of being," "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," "epiphany"—that consolidate major modernist issues and concepts.

Theorists of the Modernist Novel, as the title itself suggests, is not meant to be an exhaustive guide to any single author. In fact, it stands out from what is already on the market precisely because of the thematic organization. Instead of making Joyce or Woolf or Richardson representative of an entire genre or period, Parsons emphasizes their differences, specifically as they relate to new forms of realism, the representation of character and consciousness, gender, and time. For that reason, readers will see that the modernist novel was not some pre-made, monolithic genre. It had to be invented or adapted, and the results, as we see from the novels of Joyce, Woolf, and Richardson, were often radically different. All three novelists struggled to represent modern life, but their solutions were varied, and Parsons makes us see how, when read together, they were experimenting with narrative, language, and the form of the novel itself to capture something real, maybe even true, about the world around them.

The representation of consciousness was one of the places where the modernist novel broke forcefully from its realist predecessor, and Parsons shows us how the modernist interest in a psychological realism drove formal experimentation. Joyce, Woolf, and Richardson developed techniques that would allow them to get into the heads of their characters, but they did not do it the same way or with the same results. Joyce preferred full immersion in a few...