Introduction

Abstract

My own critical attitude is based on the recognition that the literary work has a public existence, though that is not the only existence it has. My instinct is to agree with Matthew Arnold when he wrote that art is ‘a criticism of life’ and to say, more specifically, that a novel is an examination of society. It need not be a ‘criticism’ of society: some novels endorse existing social systems and relations, and to some degree the very form of the novel is conservative. Its closed form provides a kind of comforting assurance to readers that the world is manageable and knowable; the novel itself developed as a genre during the rise of the middle classes. In fact, the current post-modernist concern with the lack of closure in the novel is in part due to this realization. The contemporary novel may actually frustrate, disconcert and discomfort the reader in ways that make it no longer a bourgeois text to be consumed and to provide comfort.