A Psychological Approach to Fiction [antikvár]

Preface This is a psychological study of five novels—Vanity Fair, The Red and the Black, The Mill on the Floss, Notes from Underground, and Lord Jim. Its understanding of neurotic processes is drawn mainly from the writings of Karen Horney, and its conceptions of health are based on what Abraham Maslow has called Third Force psychology. Since these theories are not well-known among literary critics, I have provided a full exposition of them in the second chapter. This study is concerned neither with authors as historical persons nor with reader response. It treats each of the novels discussed as an autonomous work of art; and it uses psychology to analyze important characters and to explore the consciousness of the implied author. In the opening chapter, I try to show why it is both necessary and proper to study certain kinds of characters and implied authors by a psychological method. The psychological approach developed here answers a number of needs in the criticism of fiction. The greatest achievement of many realistic novels is their portrayal of character, but we have as yet no critical perspective that enables us to appreciate this achievement and to talk about it with sophistication. Realistic novels are often flawed by incoherence and contradiction. In some, like The Red and the Black and The Mill on the Floss, there is