The Reader in Modernist Fiction - by Brian Richardson

About the Book

The first book to explore the representation of reading and its often deleterious consequences in modern fiction

Book Synopsis

Many major modernists - including Henry James, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Elizabeth Bowen, Vladimir Nabokov and Ralph Ellison - wrote central scenes describing characters reading. In most cases, the readers depicted suffer unfortunate fates. Intriguingly, the act of reading is also often intertwined with sexual activities. The Reader in Modernist Fiction analyses the construction of fictional readers, tracing their development and transformation over the first half of the twentieth century. Brian Richardson explores how the effects of reading are represented within modernist and postmodern fiction, and studies misreading as a personal limitation, sexual invitation, aesthetic allegory and ideological critique.

Review Quotes

Picasso's Femme Couche', which depicts a woman reclining and reading, appears appropriately on the cover of Richardson's study of novels by major modernist writers of fiction, who develop scenes of reading in their narratives. The engagement of the reader as an active participant is central to the modernist tradition in fiction, and, without technical jargon, Richardson (Univ. of Maryland) distinguishes between surface and reparative reading in this study. While he focuses on fiction by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and Ralph Ellison, he also addresses William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, and writers beyond the English-American sphere, like Italo Calvino. The contexts for his examination of the role of "misinterpretation" in these works range from Cervantes's Don Quixote to Ian McEwan's Atonement. Richardson extends the range of the reader, as depicted in modernism, to as early as 1857 in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and sees modernist fiction as an "interpretive labyrinth." His introduction and chapter 5 can be read independently as well as interdependently among the other chapters. Richardson brings fresh insight to this aspect of modernism.

Summing Up: Highly recommended.

--T. Bonner Jr., emeritus, Xavier University of Louisiana "CHOICE"

This book's exciting discovery - the "critical reader" cultivated by modernist fiction across a vast range of texts and authors - is a timely affirmation of modernism's cultural value as well as a welcome reminder of the profound wisdom that has established Brian Richardson as our leading authority on modernism's narrative dynamics.

--Jesse Matz, Kenyon College