"Narrative License in "The Echoing Grove

Modernism has impinged upon the poetics of prose fiction in two principal ways. First, the inward turn of narrative, which Erich Kahler saw as a progressive internalization of events' fully accomplished itself in the twentieth century; early modern writers retreated from the chaos around them by experimenting with stream-of-consciousness and various other explorations of internal psychic space. Second, modernist writers embraced a world in which fall apart; the centre cannot hold2 by echoing the age's disruptions through discontinuous narrative forms. While most modernists tended to follow either one path or the other, such important modern novelists as Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner successfully combined the two. Their example suggests that the quintessential modern novel maintains tension between at once rejecting and reflecting a disrupted world in which, in Quentin Compson's words, stable things had become shadowy paradoxical. 3 For most of her career, Rosamond Lehmann followed the first path of modernism. Her seven novels and her single collection of short stories employ various narrative voices, but all focus upon the subjective experience of being female in the twentieth century.4 Praise for Lehmann, therefore, has emphasized her humanity and her sensitive evocation of the feminine sensibility.5 Miss Lehmann's contemporary, John Bromley, for example, saw the chief significance of The Echoing Grove in its documentation of... the fundamental revolution of this age,6 by which he meant the revolution in women's consciousness

Art · License · Literature · Narrative · Operating system · Computer Science · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Irish and British Studies