“[It is assumed that] Literature should be either instructive or amusing, and there is in many minds an impression that these artistic preoccupations, the search for form, contribute to neither end, interfere indeed with both. They are too frivolous to be edifying, and too serious to be diverting; and they are moreover priggish and paradoxical and superfluous. That, I think, represents the manner in which the latent thought of many people who read novels as an exercise in skipping would explain itself if it were to become articulate. They would argue, of course, that a novel ought to be ‘good,’ but they would interpret this term in a fashion of their own, which indeed would vary considerably from one critic to another.”
—Henry James, “The Art of Fiction” (1884)

What is the value of fiction? In the above quotation, Henry James asks how that value might be described as one step toward establishing a theory of the novel which hitherto “had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it.” During the Modernist period, British critics, many of whom happened to be authors of fiction themselves, rethought the aims of fiction which were until that point largely unexamined in a systematic way. These critics performed the necessary task of justifying experimentation in fiction as British authors broke from the dominant assumptions underlying nineteenth-century literary realism. They pointed out how some innovations in the form and content of fiction remained consistent with previous ideals, such as verisimilitude and social relevance, but that authors opted for different means of achieving them. Critics and authors also strove to persuade readers to find new value in fiction by fostering an appreciation of ambiguity, difficulty, and psychology. This course will place special emphasis on how these revised notions of value were articulated and how they gradually gained wide acceptance. Today we no longer regard the majority of British Modernist fiction to be particularly radical, which suggests that we have come to acknowledge and often share their attitudes to fiction, and perhaps even that the value we find in fiction remains essentially unchanged despite literary trends.

Students in the course will analyze essays that deal with the value of fiction and pair them with their readings of novels and short stories written by British authors between 1890 and 1950. The arguments they write will center on the means and ends of fiction as described or implied in Modernist texts, not the qualitative evaluation of individual works, critical ideas or authors or values plural in the moral or religious sense. The course will focus on four stages of British Modernist fiction: Realism Reconsidered, Literary Impressionism, High Modernist Innovation, Return to the Social and Political?, and Individualism and Internationalism.