Cultural Memory, Consciousness, and The Modernist Novel

Cultural Memory, Consciousness, and the Modernist Novel

This study explores the novel and consciousness in James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. It focuses on novels of the 1920s and examines Joyce’s epiphany and language play, Yeats’s esoteric philosophy, Lawrence’s vitalism, and Woolf’s stream of consciousness techniques.

Readers are invited to enter the minds of Joyce’s characters Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in the modern city, explore the esoteric quests of William Butler Yeats, delve into the vitalism and explorations of D. H. Lawrence, experience the interiority of Virginia Woolf, and consider the artistic perspectives of the Bloomsbury Group.

Within the field of intellectual history, Robert McParland’s groundbreaking study places Joyce, Yeats, Lawrence, and Woolf within the cultural and historical context of the first half of the twentieth century. McParland adopts a philosophical humanist approach to the innovative techniques and quests of literary modernism, drawing from the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as the inquiries of Arthur Schopenhauer and Henri Bergson.

This work also builds upon the research of intellectual historian H. Stuart Hughes, the studies of James Joyce by Richard Ellmann and Helene Cixous, and David Lodge’s Consciousness in Fiction.