Challenge and Continuity: Aspects of the Thematic Novel 1830-1950(46 Textxet: Studies in Comparative Literature)

Challenge and Continuity is the first full-length attempt to map an important feature of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature: the thematic novel. It analyses it first in D.H. Lawrence, revealing how in The Rainbow and Women in Love the psychology of the characters is brought into a wider social and ideological context that generates their controlling themes. Having defined an alternative tradition, exemplified by George Eliot and Tolstoy, focused primarily on individual development, it examines how that kind of interest was aligned in the nineteenth century with the thematic, in a loose fashion by Charlotte Brontë, Turgenev, Hardy and Wells, and more precisely by Stendhal, Flaubert and Emily Brontë. Challenge and Continuity goes on to identify the core of the thematic tradition in the work of Dickens, Hawthorne, Melville, Dostoevsky and Conrad. It is then revealed as a distinguishing feature of modernism in Ford, Forster, Joyce and Woolf, with continuations into Huxley, Orwell and Beckett. With its complex of well-researched links over a very wide area, this book should appeal to scholars and students alike, and also to the general reader with some knowledge of the field.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Definition: Lawrence’s Thematic Novels 1. The Negatives of Idealism 2. The Imprisoned Self 3. Recovery and Renewal Tradition: Thematic Novels in the Nineteenth Century 4. English Traditions: George Eliot, the Brontës and Dickens 5. American Traditions: Hawthorne and Melville 6. French Traditions: Stendhal, Balzac, Zola and Flaubert 7. Russian Traditions: Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky 8. Older Contemporaries: Hardy, Wells and Conrad Context 9. Contemporaries: Ford, Forster, Joyce and Woolf 10. The Next Generation: Huxley, Orwell and Beckett Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Born Margaret Earle in 1930 in Hackney, London, the novelist was the child of a clerk in the London Docks. After a degree in English at London University and some years school-teaching and bringing up her daughter, she began her novels. In 1980 came the diagnosis of beast cancer. The remission of the disease began to give way almost as soon as The Commune was completed. She died in 1992.

Review :
Scenes where every detail is right and the atmosphere and tension and emotion all so powerful. ? Margaret Forster, novelist. The author who could write like this was rare indeed. The rhythms, both within sentences and between longer movements ? the sense of persons and ideals set in a crucible of experiment ? the great thoughtfulness which I think is a major effect and begets itself in the reader... her writing is riveting. There are moments of heart-stopping tenderness. ? Stevie Davies, novelist. She lets us meet her characters as we meet the people in our own lives ? nothing is cut-and-dried or predigested; life in her novels is as bewildering, frustrating and delighting as real life is but is so rarely presented. There's a remark about Jean-Luc Godard: "He wears dark glasses not because his eyes are weak, but because his world is strong." Margaret Buckley's world is very strong, too, in just this sense, and she explores it sensitively, boldly, and with originality. ? Andrew Davies, playwright. Her work is fascinating ? nothing like it has ever been written before. It creates a world of its own. ? Olwyn Hughes, literary agent. Margaret Buckley is like Lawrence in being able to turn the rhythms of everyday life into stories that stay in the mind. She is remarkable, too, for her ability to spread her sympathy among the characters who come into conflict in her fictions. ? Karl Miller, Founding Editor, London Review of Books. She has been compared to Lawrence, with, for me at least, this difference: I actually enjoyed reading Buckley. ? Nicholas Lezard, Guardian. She provides scenes dramatic even to the point of shocking in the surprise they arouse. ? John Mellors, London Magazine. Her writing has the power to draw readers into the lives she has created and the tensions, frustrations and occasional joys her characters experience. ? Pam Barrett, Sunday Times.