Violeta Sotirova
Literary Criticism
Coming closer to life’ and representing ‘life itself’ rather than ‘a likeness of life’, not allowing any ‘perception [to] come amiss’ (McNeillie, 1994[1925]: 164) were some of Woolf’s programmatic statements on the nature of Modern writing. The leitmotif of being truthful to life keeps reverberating throughout her essays in statements like: ‘[Several young writers] attempt to come closer to life’; ‘If we want life itself, here surely we have it’ (McNeillie, 1994[1925]: 161). Discarding external realist detail seems to be Woolf’s recipe for moving away from the predecessors’ ‘likeness of life’ (McNeillie, 1994[1925]: 160) towards ‘life itself’ (McNeillie, 1994[1925]: 161). What the modern writer should focus on is ‘an ordinary mind on an ordinary day’ with its ‘myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel’ (McNeillie, 1994[1925]: 160). And this for her is ‘the proper stuff of fiction’ (McNeillie, 1994[1925]: 161). Her often cited plea articulates precisely the shift of focus in the Modern novel:
Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small (McNeillie, 1994[1925]: 161).
Woolf’s programmatic statements, calling for representing the mind of characters, rather than their external reality, for capturing experience as it occurs in all its ordinariness and her insistence on ‘no perception com[ing] amiss’ (McNeillie, 1994[1925]: 164), as well as the promotion of the ordinary as a legitimate subject of literature, set out the principles of the Modernist aesthetic of mimetic representations of subjectivity.
When Pound commends Shakespeare for a particular line, his critical appreciation is grounded in the fact that ‘There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he presents’ (1968[1918]: 6). Three of his Imagist principles similarly place the focus of the new aesthetic on mimetic presentation:
- Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective.
- To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
- As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome (Pound, 1968[1918]: 3; cited in Nicholls, 2007: 56).
When comparing the representation of reality in earlier periods with Woolf’s method in To the Lighthouse, Auerbach also argues that:
[…] there was hardly ever any attempt to render the flow and the play of consciousness adrift in the current of changing impressions […]; instead, the content of the individual’s consciousness was rationally limited to things connected with the particular incident being related or the particular situation being described […] (1991[1945]: 535).
This mimetic rendering of consciousness is according to Auerbach the prerogative of Modernist fiction and it distinguishes it from earlier traditions, more particularly from the realist novel where the thoughts of characters are rationally organised and directed to specific objects and the situation, rather than being ‘the continuous rumination of consciousness in its natural and purposeless freedom’ (1991[1945]: 538) as is the case in Woolf and more generally in Modernist fiction. This results in a more ‘natural’, or even ‘naturalistic’ rendering of consciousness.
The stylistic technique used for the representation of consciousness, broadly defined as free indirect style, the style that linguistically blends the subjectivity of the character with the voice of the narrator, is not an invention of Modernism; what changes is the balance between representations of individual consciousness and narrative authority and the linguistic make-up of free indirect style. The coherent authoritative narrative that organises the fictional world in the Realist novel, together with the rational thoughts of the characters, is instead replaced by the subjectivity of perceiving and experiencing characters.
The new technique that Modernism brings about, alongside free indirect style, is the interior monologue – the first person, present tense Free Direct Thought (Leech and Short, 2007) of characters. Both free indirect style and interior monologue become mimetically fragmented and acquire a free-associative quality to represent more accurately the stream of consciousness, ‘which is neither restricted by a purpose nor directed by a specific subject of thought’ (Auerbach, 1991[1945]: 538).
This essay will analyse the linguistic mechanics of mimetic consciousness representation in Modernist fiction. As a point of comparison, it is useful to start by looking at a passage from Jane Austen’s Emma. At a moment of self-realisation, Emma experiences heightened emotional tension which is suggested to the reader through some minimal indication of the confused thoughts and emotions the character undergoes:
How long had Mr. Knightley been so dear to her, as every feeling declared him now to be? When had his influence, such influence begun? – When had he succeeded to that place in her affection, which Frank Churchill had once, for a short period, occupied? – She looked back; She compared the two – compared them, as they had always stood in her estimation, from the time of the latter’s becoming known to her – and as they must at any time have been compared by her, had it – oh! had it, by any blessed felicity, occurred to her, to institute the comparison. – She saw that there never had been a time when she did not consider Mr. Knightley as infinitely the superior, or when his regard for her had not been infinitely the most dear. She saw, that in persuading herself, in fancying, in acting to the contrary, she had been entirely under a delusion, totally ignorant of her own heart – and, in short, that she had never really cared for Frank Churchill at all! (Austen, Emma, 339).
Austen does use a lot of dashes that create a fragmented appearance of the discourse, but looking closely at her sentences, we can see that there is no real syntactic fragmentation and the whole discourse progresses rather coherently. The only moment where Emma breaks the flow of her thoughts is where she uses the interjection ‘oh’ to break the continuity of one of her sentences, but apart from these two features which signal the disfluency of her inner speech, the text remains remarkably coherent, considering the emotional upheaval it is meant to represent.
A much starker sense of the incoherence of the flow of consciousness is created in the following passage taken from Woolf’s To the Lighthouse:
He was an awful prig – oh yes, an insufferable bore. For, though they had reached the town now and were in the main street, with carts grinding past on the cobbles, still he went on talking, about settlements, and teaching, and working men, and helping our own class, and lectures, till she gathered that he had got back entire self-confidence, had recovered from the circus, and was about (and now again she liked him warmly) to tell her – but here, the houses falling away on both sides, they came out on the quay, and the whole bay spread before them and Mrs Ramsay could not help exclaiming , ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ (Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 18).
This is a more ordinary moment for the character, yet the disruption to the coherent flow of the discourse is indicative of a much more disrupted flow of consciousness. The first sentence: ‘He was an awful prig – oh yes, an insufferable bore’ digresses after the dash, as if adding an afterthought and linking it dialogically to the previous statement, in a way that imitates spoken language or the oral quality of inner thought. The second sentence, which occupies the rest of the passage, although containing elements of represented action is grounded in the character’s consciousness as signalled by the deictic temporal adverbs ‘now’ and ‘still’ aligned with the character’s present moment, the past perfect of ‘had reached’, the multiple coordination of parallel noun phrases, and most significantly by the syntactic interruption through parentheses and the dash, both of which result in syntactic incoherence. As Mrs Ramsay realises what Charles Tansley is about to tell her, she also experiences the emotion of liking him more strongly. This simultaneous awareness is conveyed through the insertion of the parentheses between a main verb and an infinitive where the syntactic disruption is most strongly felt – ‘and was about (and now again she liked him warmly) to tell her’. We never find out what Charles Tansley was about to tell her because just as the flow of Mrs Ramsay’s consciousness is interrupted by the beautiful view of the bay spreading in front of them, the portrayal of her thoughts and awareness of Charles Tansley’s discourse is interrupted in the text too. The striking verisimilitude of this representation, its extreme mimesis is one of the achievements of Modernism. And although the final part of this sentence contains a clause representing narrative action – ‘they came out on the quay’ – the syntactic iconicity of the experience which captures the simultaneity of this action and ‘the houses falling away’ strongly suggests the subjective experience of the character. The final two clauses – ‘and the whole bay spread before them and Mrs Ramsay could not help exclaiming’ – represent a string of loosely coordinated clauses, added on with the most frequently used in spoken discourse conjunction ‘and’. As such, they also feel to the reader as stemming from Mrs Ramsay’s consciousness rather than as being pure narration.
Joyce’s representations of character consciousness exhibit a different kind of mimetic fragmentation – one that is based on phrasal units and a complete breakdown of clausal structures:
Life those chaps out there must have, stuck in the same spot. Irish Lights board. Penance for their sins. Coastguards too. Rocket and breeches buoy and lifeboat. Day we went out for the pleasure cruise in the Erin’s King, throwing them the sack of old papers. Bears in the zoo. Filthy trip. Drunkards out to shake up their livers. Puking overboard to feed the herrings. Nausea. And the women, fear of God in their faces. Milly, no sign of funk. Her blue scarf loose, laughing. Don’t know what death is at that age. And then their stomachs clean. But being lost they fear. When we hid behind the tree at Crumlin. I didn’t want to. Mamma! Mamma! Babes in the wood. Frightening them with masks too. Throwing them up in the air to catch them. I’ll murder you. Is it only half fun? Or children playing battle. Whole earnest. How can people aim guns at each other.
[…] Her growing pains at night, calling, wakening me. Frightened she was when her nature came on her first. Poor child! Strange moment for the mother too. Brings back her girlhood. Gibraltar. Looking from Buena Vista. O’Hara’s tower. The seabirds screaming. Old Barbary ape that gobbled all his family. Sundown, gunfire for the men to cross the lines. Looking out over the sea she told me. Evening like this, but clear, no clouds. I always thought I’d marry a lord or a rich gentleman coming with a private yacht. Buenas noches, señorita. El hombre ama la muchacha hermosa. Why me? Because you were so foreign from the others (Joyce, Ulysses, 377).
A number of sentences consist of noun phrases only: ‘Irish Lights board. Penance for their sins. Coastguards too. Rocket and breeches buoy and lifeboat. Day we went out for the pleasure cruise in the Erin’s King, throwing them the sack of old papers. Bears in the zoo. Filthy trip. Drunkards out to shake up their livers.’ The progression of the discourse is based on free association and the quick succession of associations that dart through the consciousness of the character is mimetically captured through the noun phrases, quickly conjuring up images, but also managing to give the reader some idea of whole events as in ‘Day we went out for the pleasure cruise in the Erin’s King’.
Modernist writers can be credited with the invention of the interior monologue – the mode of consciousness representation that corresponds to Leech and Short’s Free Direct Thought (2007), i.e. the first person, present tense representation in real time of the flow of consciousness. Although Cohn (1978) suggests that the fragmented interior monologue of Joyce is not that far removed in grammatical status from the mode of quoted thought typical of the pre-nineteenth century novel, the stark difference in linguistic make-up, as I have argued (2013), separates these two first person modes historically and semantically.
Two studies of the interior monologue by Tumanov (1997) and Dahl (1970) list verbless clauses or nominal sentences as characteristic of this mode of consciousness presentation. These, alongside simple syntactic constructions and disturbances of word order (e.g. fronting of objects or predicate complements as in ‘But being lost they fear’), have a strong mimetic function in capturing the flow of consciousness. Another prominent feature of the interior monologue, also typical of Joyce’s rendition of Bloom’s interior monologue, is the absence of personal pronouns in subject position, characteristic of informal oral styles or informal written discourses, such as diaries for example: ‘Don’t know what death is at that age’, ‘Brings back her girlhood.’
Most characteristically, the progression of plot and action is also signalled within sections of interior monologue rather than in coherent narratorial passages. Bloom’s free associative chains are frequently recollections of past events that provide context for the present development of the novel. Particularly striking on this occasion is the clipped re-enactment of his engagement with Molly and the embedded Free Direct Speech that gives the reader some understanding of the scene: ‘Evening like this, but clear, no clouds. I always thought I’d marry a lord or a rich gentleman coming with a private yacht. Buenas noches, señorita. El hombre ama la muchacha hermosa. Why me? Because you were so foreign from the others’.
The extreme mimesis in the representation of fictional consciousness is well captured in the critical term ‘stream of consciousness’ which stylistically can be a qualitative description of either the third person, past tense free indirect style, or the first person, present tense interior monologue. Adamson’s (1999) thesis of the extreme orality of Modernist writing being its most characteristic feature is most evidently matched by the verisimilitude of the narrative experiments with consciousness representation. Although this extreme mimetic representation has been dubbed anti-realist, particularly in relation to Joyce (Nash, 1987), it might be more appropriate to describe it as hyper-realist. The hyper-realism, also advocated by Woolf in her critical essays, is linguistically so extreme, though, that it might pose problems of intelligibility (Adamson, 1999).
Similarly, Pound’s commendation of Shakespeare that he does not describe, but that ‘he presents’ (1968[1918]: 6), places the emphasis on the immediacy of experience. But since as Eliot says, ‘the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary’ and ‘disparate experience[s]’ are constantly being amalgamated into ‘new wholes’ (1972[1921]: 287), the verisimilar representation of experience poses a new challenge to Modernist writers. If experience is no longer to be described retrospectively, but captured simultaneously, its linguistic representation has to be more iconic of the actual unfolding of experience and not semantically explanatory on the level of lexis.
One of the distinctive features of Woolf’s style of representing consciousness is the use of non-finite progressives, embedded in the transcription of character thought or perspective in order to convey a different level of consciousness:
I haven’t felt so young for years! thought Peter, escaping (only of course for an hour or so) from being precisely what he was, and feeling like a child who runs out of doors, and sees, as he runs, his old nurse waving at the wrong window. But she’s extraordinarily attractive, he thought, as, walking across Trafalgar Square in the direction of Heymarket, came a young woman who, as she passed Gordon’s statue, seemed, Peter Walsh thought (susceptible as he was), to shed veil after veil, until she became the very woman he had always had in mind; young, but stately; merry, but discreet; black, but enchanting (Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 59).
Peter’s direct thought ‘I haven’t felt so young for years’ is syntactically entwined with the two non-finite progressive clauses, embedded in the inquit formula ‘thought Peter’ – ‘escaping (only of course for an hour or so) from being precisely what he was, and feeling like a child who runs out of doors, and sees, as he runs, his old nurse waving at the wrong window’. The somewhat disrupted syntax which results from such arrangements, typical of Woolf’s style, has a strong iconic function – to record the experiences on various levels of consciousness as occurring simultaneously. As Peter Walsh’s direct thought is represented in the interior monologue mode, his action of ‘escaping’ and his simultaneous ‘feeling’ are woven together syntactically to create a sense of this simultaneous experience of thought, action and internal state. The participial clauses, thus, allow for character’s action and character’s feeling to be syntactically integrated with either free indirect thought or interior monologue.
The attempt to capture the simultaneity of different levels of experience is done by a complex syntactic amalgamation of different modes of consciousness representation, most intricately practised by Woolf. In this example, we have interior monologue (‘I haven’t felt so young for years!’; ‘But she’s extraordinarily attractive’), representation of action (‘escaping’, ‘walking’), which would normally be assigned to the narrator, but do not sound very narratorial on this occasion, psychonarration (‘feeling’), represented perception (‘a young woman who […] seemed’) and free indirect thought (‘until she became the very woman he had always had in mind; young, but stately; merry, but discreet; black, but enchanting’).
What this example also brings to light is the use of parentheses for the representation of concurrent experiences. Cui (2014) has highlighted the important role that parentheses play in Woolf’s representation of character consciousness, indexing concurrent experiential states or even shifts in point of view. Parentheses are also singled out by Adamson (1999: 640) as ‘the most speech-like and the most disruptive of juxtapositional constructions’, characteristic of Modernism’s dismantling of syntax.
The mixing of representational modes in the transcription of consciousness, as witnessed here, is one of the primary achievements of Modernism. The degree to which Psychonarration, Represented Perception, Free Indirect Thought and Speech and Free Direct Thought and Speech are intertwined in Modernist narratives is one of the major reasons for the syntactic disruptions that many critics note. But the main drift behind such discontinuities is not simply the fragmentation of the text for its own sake; there is an aesthetic aim of greater significance – to capture and relay experience in its simultaneity and verisimilitude.
Mansfield’s opening of ‘Bliss’ mixes the modes of consciousness presentation in order to capture precisely this simultaneity of conscious thought, speech, perception, states:
Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at – nothing – at nothing, simply.
What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss – absolute bliss! – as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe? …
Oh, is there no way you can express it without being ‘drunk and disorderly’? How idiotic civilisation is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?
‘No, that about the fiddle is not quite what I mean,’ she thought, running up the steps and feeling in her bag for the key – she’d forgotten it, as usual – and rattling the letter-box. ‘It’s not what I mean, because – Thank you, Mary’ – she went into the hall. ‘Is nurse back?’ (Mansfield, ‘Bliss’, 1981[1920]: 109).
The opening sentence starts off as a representation of the character’s internal state in Psychonarration – ‘Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at …’ The use of temporal deixis aligned with the character – ‘still’ and ‘this’ – together with the parallel infinitive clauses – ‘wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at’ – mark the sentence as indicative of Bertha’s subjectivity, though her state is not one that she would necessarily articulate verbally to herself. The parallel constructions contribute to the layering of experience with simultaneous states, closely related to her sense of elation, yet distinct. But by the end of the sentence, the representation of consciousness has glided into Free Indirect Thought – ‘laugh at – nothing – at nothing, simply’. The syntactic discontinuity, signalled by the dashes, and the repetition are indicative of Bertha’s inner speech. The transition to Free Indirect Thought presupposes also the emergence from a more latent state of consciousness into greater conscious awareness. This trajectory towards conscious awareness continues in the second paragraph, where a shift to Interior Monologue indicates these are articulated thoughts that run through the character’s mind. The present tense and generic pronoun ‘you’ take Bertha’s experience to the surface level of articulated thought, but after the exclamation ‘absolute bliss!’ a more subdued level of consciousness is suggested through the shift to Psychonarration, or possibly Free Indirect Thought, with the past tense of Free Indirect Style creating a slight distance from the character’s immediate verbalised thought: ‘as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom…’ As Rundquist has argued: ‘The alterations in consciousness presentation categories are not merely aesthetic manoeuvres: they have an important semantic effect for the reader’s understanding of how the character is thinking’ (2014: 163).
The Interior Monologue of the third paragraph represents Bertha’s inner speech in a more direct and consciously aware manner again: ‘Oh, is there no way you can express it without being ‘drunk and disorderly’? How idiotic civilisation is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?’ But the extent of conscious awareness on the part of the character is further augmented through a shift to Direct Thought. When Bertha corrects herself in ‘No, that about the fiddle is not quite what I mean’, the effect is one as if she has just realised what she was thinking, how her thoughts were unfolding spontaneously and she corrects herself that the simile she had used in her stream of consciousness was not quite right. The transition witnessed here, between Interior Monologue and Quoted Thought (or Free Direct Thought and Direct Thought) is a significant illustration of the semantic difference between the two modes. In spite of Cohn’s (1978) insistence that this difference is primarily graphological, with the Quoted Thought mode requiring quotation marks and inquit formulas, there is a perceptible difference in quality between the two modes when set in juxtaposition, as Mansfield’s text demonstrates. The Interior Monologue, or the character’s Free Direct Though, is more spontaneous and implies less conscious awareness, it is most often meant to capture the stream of consciousness, while Quoted Thought, or the Direct Thought of the character, is much more consciously executed thought which implies control and self-awareness.
The final paragraph displays perhaps the greatest complexity in terms of the mixing of representational modes and the layering of experiences and is thus emblematic of the technical feats of Modernist fiction. Much like Woolf, Mansfield adds three progressive participial clauses to the inquit formula to transcribe the simultaneous experience of the character of her actions: ‘she thought, running up the steps and feeling in her bag for the key – she’d forgotten it, as usual – and rattling the letter-box’. Interestingly, as already demonstrated through the previous narrative examples, this experiential transcription of action is interrupted syntactically by parentheses between two dashes which contain her Free Indirect Thought, a reflection on the experience of ‘running up the steps and feeling in her bag’. But the syntactic disruption indicates simultaneity of the two levels of consciousness – the experience of the physical action and the thought. The next sentence contains another such syntactic and representational discontinuity: ‘It’s not what I mean, because – Thank you, Mary’ – she went into the hall. ‘Is nurse back?’ Bertha’s Direct Thought is left unfinished; just as she is seeking to provide a reason for herself why her simile is not entirely accurate, she has to speak to the servant, so her Direct Thought is interrupted by Direct Speech and followed by the report of action which again has strong experiential connotations, because of its syntactic blend with modes of speech and thought presentation.
One of the most significant innovations that Modernism brings to the representation of subjectivity is the verisimilitude in capturing not just articulated thought, but also the whole flow of experience in all its richness and simultaneity. The characters’ consciousness is thus represented not just as consisting of verbal thoughts, but also perceptions, feelings, and states, sometimes even experiential action. The new aesthetic of the ordinary and the concrete has led to extreme mimesis in rendering both the outside world and the consciousness that experiences it. The complexity of actual experience with all its simultaneous layers of greater and lesser conscious awareness, its chaotic and disrupted quality, is for the first time grafted in the linear text with representational iconicity that manages to convey both its simultaneity and its disorderliness at the same time. The syntactic experiments in poetry and the intricate layering of modes of consciousness representation become two of the most important achievements of Modernism because through them the dynamic and complex nature of experience is portrayed with greatest accuracy.
References:
Adamson, S.M. (1999) ‘Literary Language’, in Romaine, S. (ed) The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume 4: 1776-1997, pp. 591-690. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Auerbach, E. (1991[1945]) Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, translated by Trask, W.R. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Cohn, D. (1978) Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Cui, Y. (2014) ‘Parentheticals and the Presentation of Multipersonal Consciousness: A Stylistic Analysis of Mrs Dalloway’, Language and Literature, 23(2): 175-187.
Dahl, L. (1970) Linguistic Features of the Stream-of-Consciousness Techniques of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Eugene O’Neill. Turku: Turun Yliopisto.
Eliot, T.S. (1972[1921]) ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, in Eliot, T.S., Selected Essays, pp. 281-291. London: Faber and Faber.
Leech, G. and Short, M. (2007) Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. London: Routledge.
McNeillie, A. (ed) (1994[1925]) The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. IV, 1925-1928. London: The Hogarth Press.
Nash, C. (1987) World Games: The Tradition of Anti-Realist Revolt. London: Routledge.
Nicholls, P. (2007) ‘The Poetics of Modernism’, in Davis, A. and Jenkins, L. (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry, pp. 51-67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pound, E. (1968[1918]) ‘A Retrospect’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, edited by T.S. Eliot, pp. 3-14. New York: New Directions.
Rundquist, E. (2014) ‘How is Mrs Ramsay Thinking: The Semantic Effects of Consciousness Presentation Categories within Free Indirect Style’, Language and Literature, 23(2): 159-174.
Sotirova, V. (2013) Consciousness in Modernist Fiction: A Stylistic Study. London: Palgrave.
Tumanov, V. (1997) Mind Reading: Unframed Direct Interior Monologue in European Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Texts:
Austen, J. (1996[1816]) Emma. London: Penguin.
Joyce, J. (1983[1922]) Ulysses. London: Penguin.
Mansfield, K. (1981) Selected Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Woolf, V. (1969[1925]) Mrs Dalloway. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin.
Woolf, V. (1977[1926]) To the Lighthouse. London: Grafton Books.
Violeta Sotirova is Associate Professor in Stylistics at the University of Nottingham, UK. Her research focuses on the stylistics of narrative consciousness, literary Modernism, the linguistic expression of viewpoint, and authorial revisions. She has published two books, on D.H. Lawrence and Narrative Viewpoint (Bloomsbury, 2011) and Consciousness in Modernist Fiction (Palgrave, 2013). She is the editor of The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics (Bloomsbury, 2015) and a co-editor of Linguistics and Literary History (John Benjamins, 2016). She is also Assistant Editor of the journal of the Poetics and Linguistics Association – Language and Literature (Sage). She is currently writing a book on The Language of Modernism.
Photo Credit: Kirsten Smith is a photographer, writer, and travel addict who lives and works in San Francisco. Her photos have appeared in Cosmic Daffodil, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Vagabond City Lit. Her stories have appeared (or will soon appear) in Esoterica Magazine, JAKE the Magazine, and SPANK the CARP. Follow her on Instagram @kirsten.wanders.
L'Esprit Literary Review 