四川生活家装饰公司:stream of consciousness novel

来源:百度文库 编辑:神马品牌网 时间:2024/04/30 16:45:50
the first time's research on the stream of consciousness novel

During the modern period of English literature, the first three decades of this century were golden years of the modernist novel. In stimulating the technical innovations of novel creation, the theory of the Freudian and Jungian psycho-analysis levels of consciousness existed simultaneously in the human mind, that one's present was the sum of his past, present and future, and that the whole truth about human beings existed in the unique, isolated, and private world of each individual, writers like Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf concentrated all their efforts on digging into the human consciousness. They had created unprecedented STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS novels such as Pilgrimage(1915-1938)by Richardson, Ulysses(1922)by Joyce, and Mrs.Dalloway(1925) by Woolf. Among them, James Joyce is the most outstanding stream-of-consciousness novelist; in Ulysses, his encyclopedia-like masterpiece, Joyce presents a fantastic picture of the disjointed, illogical, illusory, and mentalmotional life of Leopold Bloom, who becomes the symbol of everyman in the post-World-War-I Europe.

Within the realistic period of American literature, one writer named Henry James is generally regarded as the forerunner of the 20th-century "stream-of-consciousness" novels and the founder of psychological realism. James's realism is characterized by his psychological approach to his subject matte. His fictional world is concerned more with the inner life of human beings than with overt human actions. His best and most mature works will rende the drama of individual consciousness and convey the moment-to-moment sense of human experience as bewilderment and discovery. And we as readers observe people and events filtering through the individual consciousness and participate in this experience. This emphasis on psychology and on the human consciousness proves to be a big breakthrough in novel writing and has great influence on the coming generations.