THE LYRICAL NOVEL

by Ralph Freedman ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

Three significant, highly suggestive essays on the ""lyrical novel"" and its development in the works of Hermann Hesse (the hero as wanderer through space and time), Andre Gide (the hero as symbolic reflector of reality's double nature) and Virginia Woolf (the hero or heroine as completely stylized sensibility, an abstraction of the inner and outer worlds). However, as formulated by Freedman, these categories always subjective in nature and rarely succinct in presentation-end to become scrambled one with the other; further, the choices are hardly incontestable: why not Joyce or Lawrence or Durrell (all of whom get passing and assed-over references) or Genet (who doesn't get anything)? Also, since Gide was as much a novelist of ideas as he was of imagistic impressionism, to focus, as reedman does, so finically on the Gidean atmosphere of ""inquietude"" and the audelariean technique, and never on, for example, the acte gratuit, somewhat istorts the discussion,- or so it seems to us. But let's not distort the review: whatever the limitations, we have here a serious, seminal excursion into the open of metaphoric narration.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Princeton Univ. Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1963

Categories: NONFICTION