Abstract

Six beautifully written essays dealing with the relation of society to self in the novels of Cervantes, nineteenth-century English writers, Proust, Sinclair Lewis and Joyce. Though there is a great deal of individual variety, the authors see the structure of the novel in terms of a tension between private vision and an unsatisfying public truth; it is the task of the novelist both to portray and to resolve this tension.--A. C. P.