A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction

By Howells, William Dean, Editor

Book Id: WPLBN0000225656
Format Type: PDF eBook
File Size: 0.5 MB
Reproduction Date: 2005

Title:	A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction
Author:	Howells, William Dean, Editor
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Literature, Literature & thought, Writing.
Collections:	Classic Literature Collection
Historic Publication Date:
Publisher:	World Ebook Library


Citation APA MLA Chicago Howells, W. D. (n.d.). A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction. Retrieved from http://self.gutenberg.org/

Excerpt
It is consoling as often as dismaying to find in what seems a cataclysmal tide of a certain direction a strong drift to the opposite quarter. It is so divinable, if not so perceptible, that its presence may usually be recognized as a beginning of the turn in every tide which is sure, sooner or later, to come. In reform, it is the menace of reaction; in reaction, it is the promise of reform; we may take heart as we must lose heart from it. A few years ago, when a movement which carried fiction to the highest place in literature was apparently of such onward and upward sweep that there could be no return or descent, there was a counter-current in it which stayed it at last, and pulled it back to that lamentable level where fiction is now sunk, and the word novel is again the synonym of all that is morally false and mentally despicable. Yet that this, too, is partly apparent, I think can be shown from some phases of actual fiction which happen to be its very latest phases, and which are of a significance as hopeful as it is interesting. Quite as surely as romanticism lurked at the heart of realism, something that we may call psychologism has been present in the romanticism of the last four or five years, and has now begun to evolve itself in examples which it is the pleasure as well as the duty of criticism to deal with.

Table of Contents
· I. · II. · III. · IV. · V. · VI. · VII. · VIII.