Some Characteristic Features of Literary Modernism
After discussing the various reasons which have made the novel the most popular literary form today, let us consider the main characteristics of the modern novel.They have also tried to avoid all that militates against plausibility, as Thackeray's unwise technique of addressing in his own person, and confessing that it is all a story.He is 'realistic' in the wider sense, and tries to include within the limits of the novel almost everything--the mixed, average human nature--and not merely one-sided view of it. Tolstoy's War and Peace and George Eliot's Middle March had proved that the texture of the novel can be made as supple and various as life itself.They have introduced into the novel subtle points of view, reserved and refined characters, and intangible delicacies, of motive which had never been attempted before by any English novelist.?