Title: Social reality and narrative form in the fiction of Henry Green
Abstract:Social Reality and Narrative Form in the Fiction of Henry Green contests the
dominant reading of Henry Green's fiction as an abstract, autonomous textual
production. My thesis situates Green into a ...Social Reality and Narrative Form in the Fiction of Henry Green contests the
dominant reading of Henry Green's fiction as an abstract, autonomous textual
production. My thesis situates Green into a number of literary and socio-historical
contexts and argues that doing so challenges a number of prevailing critical
orthodoxies. I also argue that Green's fiction is formally constructed through a
variety of dislocations, from displacing the centrality of plot, undermining the
integrity of character, silencing the narrative voice and questioning the authenticity
of the self. To relate social reality to narrative form, each of the four main chapters is
dedicated to one of four substantive aspects of material reality: age, class, geography
and the body. In the first chapter, I examine Green's relationship to the writing of his
generation and to the concepts of age and youth. I argue that Green was deeply
ambivalent towards generational belonging or the notion that identity could be
supplied through one's generation. My second chapter investigates Green's treatment
of social class and positions his Birmingham factory novel, Living, against 1930s
theories of proletarian fiction and its canonical texts. My third chapter considers sites
of authority both in the external world (geographic space) as well as within the
novelistic space. The eclipsing of the narrator and the subsequent translation of the
imaginative faculty to the reader is a part of Green's strategy to displace sites of
authority. My final chapter looks at Green‘s treatment of the physical body and
argues that disability is a central aspect of his novelistic practice. The impossibility
of unity and wholeness, therefore, sheds light not only on the physicality of modern
man but also on wholeness as a mental and linguistic possibility when the times are
'breaking up.'Read More
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-10-01
Language: en
Type: dissertation
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 1
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot