Authorial Divinity in the Twentieth Century: Omniscient Narration in Woolf, Hemingway, and Others"Whatever a writer's religious assumptions and histories, the literary device of omniscient narration traps a writer into a pose as God, at least some sort of God, be it one the writer eschews, avows, or longs for. In this study, Barbara K. Olson examines the relationship between both the writer and the omniscient narrator to God." "Olson explains how modernists Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf both illustrate how authors' particular styles of omniscience bear a reliable though variable relation to their own or their culture's particular conceptions of God." "The experience of novelists generally attests to perennial theological conundrums into which their creating and narrating have cast them - transcendence vs. immanence, providential care vs. cosmic capriciousness, determinism vs. freedom. Not surprisingly, such atheists as John Fowles and Ronald Sukenick have aimed their narrational experiments in omniscience at subverting what Fowles has called the "godgame" that this device requires. Such other writers as Flannery O'Connor, Graham Greene, and Murial Spark have predictably relied on the device as one consonant with their theistic assumptions."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved |
Contents
Acknowledgments | 7 |
Omniscient Narration | 37 |
Who Thinks It? Process Theism and Woolfs | 64 |
Copyright | |
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anonymity argued artist author/God analogy authorial narrator authorship Bakhtin Barthes believe Bell Tolls called century characters Christian cocreation concept consolation convention creator critics Dalloway Damrosch death diary earlier empathy emphasis added Ernest Hemingway Ethel Smyth experience fact feel fictional world Fictions of Authority finds Flaubert Fowles free indirect style French Lieutenant's Woman godlike Hemingway Hemingway's Early human Ibid immanent insists Jacob's Room John Fowles Joyce Kermode language least Lighthouse literary Literature Margot's Max Perkins metaphysical miming mind modernist Muriel Spark Naremore Narrative Act narrator's never novel novelist observed omni omniscient narration panentheism panentheistic paradoxically Poetics Pointz Hall pose postmodernist presence process theology Quoted readers reality religious Roland Barthes Ronald Sukenick says seems Selected Letters self-conscious Snows of Kilimanjaro Spilka Sternberg story suggests Susan Lanser tell theological analogies thought Tigerstedt tion transcendent University Press Virginia Woolf voice Whitehead Woolf's narrator words writing wrote