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Butler, Hardy, Galsworthy, Bennett and d.h. lawrence as writers of the family chronicle novel: a study of two generations of possibilities of the form

University of British Columbia

The English family chronicle novel is a comparatively recent phenomenon. It occurred as a reflection of the controversies of nineteenth-century natural science over evolutionary development--directly, in Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, and indirectly, as English novelists felt the influence of French naturalism. Because the emergence of the family chronicle novel is so closely bound up with naturalism, nowhere can we more clearly see the reaction to naturalism worked out than in the Victorian and Edwardian family chronicles. Very often, to understand the way in which a given novel is a family chronicle--that is, how the author has used the form for his own purposes--is to define the author's stance toward naturalism. In this thesis, I examine works of five chronicle writers--Butler, Hardy, Galsworthy, Bennett, and Lawrence-- and argue that a measure of the success of the works as family chronicles is the degree to which the artists succeed in overcoming the inherent limitations of the naturalist convention, even as they used the form bequeathed by it. I suggest that D. H. Lawrence's, The Rainbow is the most interesting of these family chronicles because he has used aspects of the art of Butler and Hardy, in order to create in opposition to Bennett and Galsworthy. He works with the underlying concerns of naturalism in order to transform them into a passionate denial of the determinist attitude implicit in naturalism.

Text

2011-05-13

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/34580

English

University of British Columbia

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