The English family chronicle novel is a comparatively recent phenomenon. It occurred as a reflection of the controversies of nineteenth-century natural science over evolutionary development--directly, in Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, and indirectly, as English novelists felt the influence of French naturalism.
Because the emergence of the family chronicle novel is so closely bound up with naturalism, nowhere can we more clearly see the reaction to naturalism worked out than in the Victorian and Edwardian family chronicles. Very often, to understand the way in which a given novel is a family chronicle--that is, how the author has used the form for his own purposes--is to define the author's stance toward naturalism. In this thesis, I examine works of five chronicle writers--Butler, Hardy, Galsworthy, Bennett, and Lawrence-- and argue that a measure of the success of the works as family chronicles is the degree to which the artists succeed in overcoming the inherent limitations of the naturalist convention, even as they used the form bequeathed by it. I suggest that D. H. Lawrence's, The Rainbow is the most interesting of these family chronicles because he has used aspects of the art of Butler and Hardy, in order to create in opposition to Bennett and Galsworthy. He works with the underlying concerns of naturalism in order to transform them into a passionate denial of the determinist attitude implicit in naturalism. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/34580 |
Date | January 1971 |
Creators | Simpson, Lana |
Publisher | University of British Columbia |
Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
Language | English |
Detected Language | English |
Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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