Nine books that broke the nineteenth-century novel
Between 1899 and 1927 the novel stopped explaining itself. These nine books, from Conrad's river to Woolf's single day, show the technique changing in real time. Read them in publication order if you want the argument to make sense.
The list
- Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad, 1899. A hundred pages that changed how English fiction writes about certainty and distance.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Turn of the Screw — Henry James, 1898. The most perfectly ambiguous ghost story in English, and a masterclass in unreliable narration.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Sons and Lovers — D. H. Lawrence, 1913. Lawrence's most accessible novel, and the best account of a working-class childhood in English fiction.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — James Joyce, 1916. A portrait of an artist as a young egotist, written with extraordinary control of style.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Ulysses — James Joyce, 1922. The novel that changed what fiction could do, and much funnier than its reputation.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Mrs Dalloway — Virginia Woolf, 1925. The best introduction to Woolf: short, social, and technically astonishing without showing off.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Voyage Out — Virginia Woolf, 1915. Woolf's first novel: imperfect, but already interested in the gap between a woman's inner life and her social role.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Sun Also Rises — Ernest Hemingway, 1926. The definitive novel of the lost generation, written with a discipline that hides its own feeling.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925. The most perfectly constructed American novel of the twentieth century, and shorter than you remember.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon
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