Introduction

Abstract

‘Late Victorian’ and ‘Early Modern’ are descriptive titles which are often used to refer to the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries respectively. This use of different names suggests that many people feel that there was a change in sensibility at that time. There is a tacit assumption that Pater, Meredith, and Gissing are all novelists whose work shares common features with other ‘Late Victorian’ writers. Equally, Lawrence, Conrad, and Joyce are generally felt to be harbingers of a new kind of fiction, and thus to be representative of the ‘Early Modern’ period. However, the distinction acknowledged between the two periods is taken for granted rather than closely defined. Little attempt is made to establish the exact differences between these two groups of authors and the historical periods in which they lived and wrote, or to demonstrate that they are as far apart in style and outlook as is usually supposed. The main aim of this book is to examine some novels written during the transition from the one period to the other, to see whether such an agreement — that there was change and that the end of the nineteenth century is different from the beginning of the twentieth century — can be justified with reference to developments in fictional prose.