The Lyrical Novel: Studies in Hermann Hesse, Andre Gide, and Virginia Woolf

by Ralph Freedman

The author, in defining the genre of lyrical fiction, separates a type of .fiction that can be legitimately viewed as "poetry" from other narrative types. The lyrical novelist uses fictional devices to find an aesthetic expression for experience, achieving an effect most frequently seen in dreams, picaresques, and allegories. Analyzing representative novels by Hermann Hesse, Andre Gide, and Virginia Woolf, Ralph Freedman focuses on the problem of self-consciousness. His findings are directly applicable to much twentieth-century fiction.



Originally published in 1963.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

294 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1963

About the author

Ralph Freedman, who grew up in Nazi Germany, emigrated at 19 to England and ultimately the United States. He served in the US Army during World War II, in Tunisia, Sicily and Italy, afterwards graduating from the University of Washington and earning a doctorate at Yale. He taught 12 years at the University of Iowa, 22 at Princeton and for two post-retirement years at Emory University. He wrote and published two novels (Divided, 1948 and Rue the Day, 2009), criticism (The Lyrical Novel, 1963), biographies of Hesse (1978), Rilke (1996), and many essays. His works have been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, and Japanese. A Chinese version of the biography of Rilke is in press.

Reviews

[Dajana]

Pročitala sam teorijski deo knjige i analize dela koja sam pročitala, ostalo nije imalo smisla čitati. Studija je definitivno korisna, ali zastarela kad je reč o ovoj tematici, posebno zato što je lirski roman u drugoj polovini 20. veka, čini mi se, doživeo vrhunac.