The world and the book: A study of modern fiction

This text questions whether the ease by which modern art has been assimilated, perhaps suggests that its radical and subversive nature has not been recognised. The book deals primarily with one branch of modern art - the modern novel - in the belief that the problems we encounter in our response to fiction are typical of those raised by any art. Following the example of the great moderns - Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot - the book questions both the foundations of fiction and the norms of the western artistic tradition, that is, the tradition of realism developed in the Renaissance and the 17th century. In the process it analyzes the work of Chaucer, Rabelais, Swift and Hawthorne, as well as that of Proust, Nabakov, Bellow and Golding, showing that these constitute what might well be called a tradition of the anti-novel, of fiction which defines itself by opposition to the naive realism of the traditional novel. The book is not intended as literary criticism in the ordinary sense, nor as a book of aesthetics, but as an exploration in discursive terms of some of the author's own central concerns as a writer, and a celebration of some of the authors he most admires. Gabriel Josipovici ha