Realism and Theories of the Novel

The spatial event of writing: John Galsworthy and the creation of Fraternity

“…20 There is something of a slight in this remark, for at a time of literary innovation with the new realism of the 1890s and the work of early modernists like Henry James and Joseph Conrad, the stress on 'explicitly' suggests Galsworthy's inclination towards the encompassing, omnipotent and deterministic prose style associated with Victorian social realism. 21 One of the overriding purposes of Victorian social realism was to convey a sense of social and moral certainty from the represented world to the real world, and in Virginia Woolf's view, this was precisely what Galsworthy's fiction sought to do. 22 Yet, in the very composition of Fraternity Galsworthy was aware of something different going on, observing to Edward Garnett that it was 'a queer book.…”