STRANGE LIKENESS

The modern novel, so the story goes, thinks poorly of mere descriptionwhat Virginia Woolf called that ugly, that clumsy, that inco ngruous tool. As a result, critics have largely neglected description as a feature of novelistic innovation during the twentieth ce ntury. Dora Zhang argues that descriptive practices were in fact a crucial site of attention and experimentation for a number of ear ly modernist writers, centrally Woolf, Henry James, and Marcel Proust.Description is the novelistic technique charged with establish ing a commo...[Read more]