The World and the Book

The World and the Book seems to me one of the finest first books of criticism to have appeared in England for a long time, and I warmly recommend it to anyone interested in literature of any period between Dante and Robbe-Grillet.' - David Lodge, Critical Quarterly Nowadays we all believe we understand modern art, but do we? The very ease with which it appears to have been assimilated suggests that its radical and subversive nature has not been recognised. Although the present book deals primarily with one branch of modern art - the modern novel - it does so 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 - this 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 seventeenth century. In the process it analyses 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.