Abstract

Abstract:

This essay considers the role of Jamesian point of view in the cultural struggle waged during the interwar years to legitimate the novel as an art form. Starting with Percy Lubbock’s famous formulation of point of view, it examines the different positions writers, critics, and other consecrating agents took with respect to it as point of view became the defining formal device of the modernist novel. This new perspective on point of view prompts us to reconsider its critical usefulness and sheds light on the role of realism in the critical naturalization of the novel as a world system.

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