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VICTORIAN SOCIAL PROBLEM NOVEL TRADITION IN THE XXI CENTURY: A WEEK IN DECEMBER BY SEBASTIAN FAULKSAND CAPITAL BY JOHN LANCHESTER
Boris M. Proskurnin
Doctor of Philology, Professor, Head of World Literature and Culture Department Perm State University
614990, Russia, Perm, Bukirev str., 15. bproskurnin@yandex.ru
Maria I. Filipieva
Master of Philology, Senior Teacher
Department of English for Professional Communication
Perm State University
614990, Russia, Perm, Bukirev str., 15. maria_filipieva@mail.ru
The article is focused on the two contemporary novels "A Week In December" by Sebastian Faulks and "Capital" by John Lanchecter and their connections with British social problem novel of the XVIII -XIX centuries. The novels under study continue the classical tradition of social novel genre and enrich the classical formula of the genre. The article analyses the traditional genre elements and poetics of social problem novel in the national literature and attributes the novels under study as a new stage in the genre development.
Key words: English literature, Sebastian Faulks, John Lanchester, social novel, Victorian tradition.
The history of every national literature is the matter of dialectics of traditions and innovations. This is more than obvious when we think about the place and role of the Victorian period in the history of English literature. This period, substantially linked with the previous stages, especially with that of Enlightment, plays a serious role in the forming and establishing of the visage and lines of the literature of the XX century in the ways of neglecting, repulsion, debating, acceptance, reflecting, copying, parodying, playing, apprenticeship and what not. This fact is determined by the place which the Victorian Age occupies in the history of the country being an epoch when contemporary Britain in majority of its characteristics was formed. There are lots of interesting and convincing speculations on that matter.
© Proskurnin B. M., Filipieva M. I., 2017
Michael Wheeler in his very much fundamental book on the Victorian literature supposes that during the Victorian Age which is characterized by permanently increasing speed of the society's development, quite 'shifting relationship between the individual and society' got its genre implementation - social problem novel with its specific themes, motifs, and symbols [Wheeler 1986: 5]). This thematic and problematic centre - a human being's existence in the time of transition, in a progressive direction, though not without dramas and even tragedies, the Victorians ardently believed, -determined the unity of two approaches to the depicting contemporary life: that of social analysis and that of psychological analysis; the format of a novel was an exact place for the two to meet.
That is why these two words 'Victorian novel' since the Victorian Age has been a construct of some constant content and form. Deidre David in Introduction to The Cambridge Companion of the Victorian Novel writes: 'Victoria's coronation in 1837 signals the official inception of the literary form that we now designate the Victorian novel, just as her death in 1901 marks its official demise' [The Cambridge Companion 2001:1]. The critic rightly asserts: 'By the time of the Great Exhibition in 1851, the novel was firmly established as the literary form of the age, and as the epigraph to this introductory chapter suggests, by 1870 that form had gained such a hegemonic hold over British reading public that it was to be found virtually everywhere' [The Cambridge Companion 2001: 6 - 7]. The epigraph is as follows: 'Novels are in the hands of us all; from the Prime Minister down to the last-appointed scullery maid. We have them in our library, our drawing rooms, our bed-rooms, our kitchens - and in our nurseries' [The Cambridge Companion 2001:1]. This is a phrase from Anthony Trollope's lecture with quite a remarkable and a very Victorian - in terms of understanding the role of literature - title 'On English Prose Fiction as a Rational Amusement'.
The genre of social problem novel in its various modifications was in great demand at that time, and it was not only because, as Wheeler asserts, 'the Condition of England Question came to a head in the debates' [Wheeler 1986: 32] and 'the reformist drive' pulsated [Wheeler 1986: 33] but because of the idea of a society as a social body profoundly established, the body where everything that happens are derivative of the process of social life and influences each part (element) of this 'body' through the activity of human beings as a sort of 'blood and flesh' of this body. So, the idea of sociality (социальность) became permanent in the novel. It is so not only with the novel of the 1840s, when, by A. O. J. Cockshut, a prominent Victo-rianist of the middle of the XX century, 'the entrance of industrial England, with its smoke, grime, misery and oppression into serious literature' happened [The Victorians 1970: 13], but with the novel of the Victorian era on
the whole, for, as Cockshut stresses, the Victorians cultivated social feelings [The Victorians 1970: 14] and their social feelings stretched out up 'to the unknown man at the bottom of the social pyramid' [The Victorians 1970: 14]. This 'man at the bottom of the social pyramid' entered the novel of the XIX century not as an exotic element, or as an element of the backdrop and no more but as a separate and essential part of the social structure which is vital for the social organism and its existence. The novel life of this 'man at the bottom', as well as of any other human beings, began to be depicted not only in the comic and grotesque ways (as some 'common men' in Sir Walter Scott's novels, for example) but psychologically funded, supplied by deep feelings, dramas and tragedies, as it happened in Adam Bede or in Silas Marner by George Eliot. In other words it is in the Victorian epoch when the whole spectrum of the social life began to be reflected in the social problem novel.
Cherishing traditions is often admitted to be the distinguishing feature of British contemporary literature. It is more than true with regard to the Victorian literature. Deidre David calls us to 'consider the enduring cultural capital of Victorian fiction at the beginning of the twenty-first century' [The Cambridge Companion 2001: 10]. She writes on; ''The Victorian novel's participation in intellectual debates anticipates the twentieth-century's preoccupations with battles between the sexes, the ravages of war, struggles for social justice, alterations in traditional family structures, and the unpredictability of future technological advancement proceeding at a furious rate' [The Cambridge Companion 2001: 11].
We may observe this appeal to Victorian literary traditions in three ways. One is known as Neo-Victorian novel, i.e. direct much as though gaming reconstruction of the Victorian Age as it is seen, understood and interpreted by the 're-constructors and de-constructors'. The most early well-known example of such a type appeal to the Victorian Age is John Fowles's French Lieutenant's Woman; among the most attractive ones -Arthur and George by Julian Barnes or Fingersmith by Sarah Waters should be mentioned. Probably so called 'sequels' to some great XIX century novels, for example, two 'continuations of 'Austen's Pride and Prejudice written by Emma Tenant in 1993 and 1994, should be included in this group (Pemberley, or Pride and Prejudice Continued and An Unequal Marriage: Or PrideandPrejudice Twenty Years Later accordingly). We think that Possesion by Antonia Susan Byatt and Graham Swift's Ever After should be mentioned here as bright samples of overlapping and simultaneous plot existence of the two epochs under 'one genre roof. The third way which is in the centre of our talk today is the use of the traditions of the social problem novel of the XIX century established and developed by the Victorian mas-
ters. We often see that contemporary writers productively refer to classical literature forms and methods when creating their own pictures of current life. This phenomenon can be vividly traced when comparing two masterfully written social novels A Week in December (2010) by Sebastian Faulks and Capital (2013) by John Lanchester with the classical form of the genre. Karen Hewitt in the Commentaries on both novels stresses the inter-textual relations of the Faulks' and Lanchester's novels with the XIX century novels:
A Week in December 'has much to say about contemporary Britain. <...> in the nineteenth century such novels were known as 'Condition of England' novels. Dickens wrote several (for example, Bleak House) as did other novelists like Trollope (The Way We Live Now)' [A Week in December 2012: 5]. And we read about Lanchester's novel: 'Capital is partly inspired by the popular ''Condition of England' novels of the nineteenth century, although in this case it is definitely a 'Condition of London' novel' [Capital 2016: 6].
Both writers are bright representatives of the literary process in Britain of the turn of the centuries. Significant events of the historical, social and spiritual processes of the late XX and early XXI centuries in the UK contributed to the interest of the writers to the rapidly changing social structure of the country, the issue of defining a new national identity, to the acute cultural and moral issues of the society. And they think that to use the narrative forms and artistic elaborations of the genre developed by the predecessors would be useful very much.
Sebastian Faulks started his literature career as an editor and a journalist. His personal interest, by his own assertion, lies within the question "How we got into this terrible mess and who we are" [interview to the newspaper lenta.ru]. The author himself gives two reasons which prompted him to create a social panorama novel of the modern Britain: his own interest in the present as a complex cultural phenomenon and the desire to apply to the tradition of social problem novel. "I wanted to write a novel with the plot that is taking place now, at the moment. It is very disappointing that in Britain there are no writers such as John Updike, to write about the real time. I also like Dickens very much, the way he wrote about London. The idea of this book was to make a bridge between Dickens and Updike" [interview to the newspaper lenta.ru]. John Updike is an American writer who is called 'the bard and the anatomist of American middle class'; he is the creator of the most known image of a XX century petit bourgeois - Harry Angstrom, the Rabbit. John Updike's artistic world is built on the synthesis of subtle psychological analysis, irony and virtuoso drawing of social nuances.
Coming back to Faulks's novel, we have to say that in the centre of the analytically sharpened narrative there are the lives of the representatives of different British (more exact - London) social strata. They are interconnected, as it should be in a novel, by 'accidental' meetings and common social problems they face, for example, power of money and ideology of consumerism, degradation of education system, of literature and art, crisis of family values, dominance of virtual reality as a way for an individual to escape from life, cruelty of mass- media and its imposed dominance in forming public opinion, etc.
John Lanchester, as well as Sebastian Faulks, is a well-known journalist and writer in Britain, the author of memoirs, art and journalistic works. The impulse to use the form of social novel for Lanchester was mainly the changes brought to the country by the financial crisis of 2008. Capital represents the life of a central London street during a year (December 2007 - December 2008), including the time of the financial crisis. The author develops the plot-lines of the houses' owners and focuses the reader's interest at the most urgent issues of the modern capital, the place which much more vividly reflects the national life: social, cultural, racial changes in the life of London, social injustice, the ruining power of money, the widening gap between the rich and the poor, the loss of moral values, fear towards radical Islam, complex feelings and attitudes to migrants, etc.
Here we are coming back to one of the crucial genre characteristics of a social problem novel of the XIX century - a panoramic principle of the plot constructing, the use of a principle which we call 'vertical (simultaneous) social cut' when a plot is made of the simultaneous action of personages which represent various and even different 'slices' of a social organism. In the novel by Faulks this simultaneity is based on the idea of a week through which all personages live through; in Lanchester's novel - one street and its inhabitants who all are involved into this mysterious case called 'We Want What You Have'. By M.Bakhtin's term both writers use differently centered chronotops to achieve the same effect: to give a panoramic, multi-sided picture of the social processes at some definite moment. These chro-notops and the panoramic principles used by the writers determine the epic character of narrative. Here we may refer to famous Northrop Fry's statement: 'The novel tends to be extroverted and personal; its chief interest is in human character as it manifests itself in society' [The Novel. Modern Essays in criticism 1969: 35]. And we would add: as society manifests itself in/trough a character. In other words, the epic essence of the novels, which is obvious and undoubted, emerged when a big world is lived through, transmitted through the mind and psyche of a character, when a character and society are narratively congruent. The devices which enhance the epic
side of both narratives are 'Prologue' in Lanchester's novel and the list of guests (further - the characters of the novel) whom Sophie Topping (isn't it an emblematic surname?) intends to invite for her dinner.
So, we may definitely say, that some similar intentions and issues raised can be attributed to the both novels. The authors, worried with the present state of the British society, chose the form of the social problem novel to address first of all to the morals of the readers, to appeal to their social experience, sense and feelings. Closer we look at the literature works, more similarities with the classical form of a social problem novel we see. Both authors when reproducing the modem society use the methods and approaches the Victorian masters developed.
In a move to portray a wide panorama of the society, the authors, following mostly the classical mode of the social novel of the XIX century, achieve this through the depicting diversity of typical characters by means of the unity of which the feature of a modern multicultural society is composed. This is fully applied to the novels analyzed in the work. Continuity of the tradition of holistic reproduction of society in the modern English realistic novel is confirmed by the preservation of these basic principles, techniques and tools developed to its best by Victorian authors.
One of the features of the social novel poetics in these works is the introduction of a mystery element, which their predecessors used more than once, Dickens, for example. This element plays a plot-forming role and helps both to connect numerous plot lines of novels and to present the moral and ethical issues of modern British society more sharply. Here we may again address to the 'Commentary' on Capital written by Karen Hewitt [see: Hewitt 2016].
A well-known known artistic feature of the social novel of the Victorian time is Benjamin Disraeli's finding of the two nations in which early Victorian England, as her saw it, was divided. Since the 'hungry 1840s' the conflict of the poor and the rich had been an integral part of the social life picture (despite the growth of the number of prosperous people through the XIX century). The submission of the sharp social conflict of the poor and the rich by means of realistic detailing of people's everyday life can be traced in both novels we are speaking about. The reader sees cheap rented tiny flats, plain food, modest if not wretched dwellings of the people who earn their own bread by hard work (Jenny, a train driver, Gabriel, a barrister -in A Week in December; Quentina, a Zimbabweian refugee, illegally working as a traffic warden, the Kamals' family, the corner shop owners who are far from prosperity, Matya, a Hungarian nunny, Zbignev, a Polish builder who both perform their work much better than English people because they have just to survive in a foreign country, - in Capital). At the
same time this down-to-earth life is opposed to the luxurious life of the upper-middle class in rich mansions, their endless guest dinners and celebrations with delicious food and constantly changed expensive clothes, the world of business, stock exchange market and politics (the Toppings' family, the Al-Rashids, the Veals' - in Faulks's work; the Younts' family, Mike, Rodger's bank investors - in Lanchester's book). This two-world contrast not only quotes the classic pattern, but moreover outlines still existing huge gap between the rich and the poor at the present time.
The tiny details presented to the reader by the authors help to give the bright and deep picture of the modern capital society complicated structure. It includes not only the rich and the poor, it is much more complex. There are native Londoners and assimilated migrants, newcomers and refugees, the ones who come to work and the ones who waste their life, people of different origins, believes and faith.
In Faulks's novel we read:
'The GCSE class came in, as it willed: Aaron, Adir, Alex, Arusha, Ben, Darryl, David, Ezra, Ian, Jasmin, Jordan, Ladan, Laila, Marcus, Mehreen, Michael, Nathan, Nawshad, Nooshin, Ocado, Paul, Pratap, Rubina, Ryan, Sangita, Sherin, Simon, Zainun' [Faulks 2009: 139].
Socio-cultural and psychological diversity of characters helps the writers identify current problems of social reality, which in many respects resonate with the problems of novels raised in the XIX century literature: the decline of morality, social injustice, depressing correlation of moral, ethical and material values, the crisis of the family institution on the one hand and on the other - an acute awareness of the importance of the family and its values in the spiritual regeneration of society. In the novel of Sebastian Faulks there are carefully worked out substantively and psychologically verified political storyline (John Veals), what is also a good English tradition, if you recall Trollope, George Eliot, George Meredith.
As both novels reflect the city at the time of the financial crisis it is natural that the authors include 'financial' characters into the plot. They are John Veals (A Week in December) and Roger Yount (Capital). The characters that devote their lives to the instant profit chase, the City people who have no any interests outside work and making money.
We read in the novel by Sebastian Faulks:
'John had no power boats or polo ponies; no collections of Sumerian stone tablets or early Picassos; no mortgage, no hobbies and no interests outside work' [Faulks 2010: 11].
Somewhere in the passageways of John Veals's mind, beyond the thoughts of wife, children, daily living, carnal urges, beyond the scar tissue of experience and loss, there was a creature whose heart beat only to market movements. He couldn't be happy as a man if his positions weren't making money. For John Veals, the analysis of a potential position was therefore more than a business or a mathematical problem; it involved something painfully close to self-knowledge. His life depended on it [Faulks 2010: 14].
John Lanchester ironically writes about Roger Yount:
'He had been to a good school (Harrow) and a good university (Durham) and got a good job (in the City of London) and been perfect in his timing (just after the big Bang, just before the City became infatuated by the mathematically gifted and/or barrow boys)' [Lanchester 2012: 15].
The word 'good' is very much characteristic: good means here respectable, adopted by the establishment, by those who succeeds in this life.
One more classical tradition can be traced in connection with these two representatives of the financial world. Both authors turn to the XIX century social satire tradition when types (emblems) are gained to sharp social issues, when depth and subtlety of images are sacrificed for satirical (and thus didactic) purposes, remember Dickens, but more - Thackeray, and perhaps even more -'The Way We Live Now' by Anthony Trollope. Undoubtedly, these two characters, those of John Veal and - to a certain extent and with some reservations - Roger Yount, are the satirical types, what is obvious through satirical remarks and descriptions of their actions and reflections when the ironical and satirical attitude to the personage which the author tends to form in a reader emerged from the subtext.
' - Christ , John," said Godley. "Talk about working the blind side. All those pensioners. You'll be attacked by an army of zimmer frames. Savaged by."
- By a toothless army,' said Veals' [Faulks 2010: 36].
'And these deals, he pointed out, did generate real revenue, which in turn generated tax (some tax anyway, depending on how efficient your tax-avoidance department was) for hospitals, roads, all that' [Faulks 2010: 11].
Irony and satire sharpen the authors' approaches to the issues that seem to them the most burning. For Sebastian Faulks these are the classes con-
trast, the media obsession of the young generation, religious conflicts and radical Islam. John Lanchester is deeply worried with the inner family relationships decline and the refugees and migrants questions, especially - with the latter:
'The people who worked with immigrants always ran a risk of coming to believe that they worked for the immigrants. That was a mistake Peter never made. He remembered who paid his salary' [Lanchester 2012: 486].
As we see, the novels under the analysis reflect the issues topical for the XXI century society: the consequences of the information technologies development and the swift onset of the post-industrial era; commercialization of art, literature, sports, leisure; the problems of inter- and cross-cultural relations, difficulties of human beings' communication, problems of mutual understanding, etc. Turning back to the principles and methods proposed by writers of the XIX century, modern writers rethink the role of society in the formation of the personality and the role of the individual in the life of society.
It is also obvious, as we see, that contemporary social problem novel authors when composing their samples of the genre widely appeal to the aesthetic of the Victorian novel. One of the most striking moments of the use of Victorian inheritance in contemporary prose is character-making, when social, psychological, and moral aspects interweave and form a very tight unity, when social component is not placard but dissolves in psychological, moral, domestic, private slices of the narrative. In this respect the art of George Eliot is in demand. We mean here not only introduction of new social strata made by her in Adam Bede, Silas Marner or Daniel Deronda. We even do not mean here her masterpiece Middlemarch where she created a peculiar model of English provincial society (in this respect both Lanchester and Faulks create their models of the British society of the early XXI century). We mean here George Eliot's deep analysis of the characters in dramatic socio-cultural and moral situations given through the mind of the personages. Here we suggest to remember Virginia Woolf and her high appraisal of George Eliot's art of constructing characters which are given, as Woolf asserts, in the 'flow of memory and humor' [Woolf 1942: 211], we should remember that Woolf permanently uses the word 'mind' when writing on George Eliot's art, on her mastery of 'details and subtleties' [Woolf 1942: 212], on 'reflective richness' [Woolf 1942: 216] of Eliot's narration about her personages, who are interesting for readers not due to their 'flesh' or actions but due to their very often tossing and restless inner worlds, narratively widely open for readers. George Eliot outlines the psychological
component as the basic one for the representation of the difficult existence of the individual in the society. And this is the means to characterize the society.
George Eliot's mastery in representing the very process of a personage's inner world's absorbtion of the outer world, personage's living through it and Eliot's keeping us at the spots of this living through is a sort of permanent lesson which she is teaching English literature till now. Look at Lan-chester's novel and first of all at the personages who are experiencing hard circumstances, Quentina, for example:
'So Quentina, however hard things currently were, felt sure that she had a future, and consequently she was the client of the refuge who functioned best, a fact that was openly acknowledged by the charity worker and the other clients. She was not angry, she was not insane, she had a job (albeit an illegal one), she spoke good English, people could talk to her. As a result she had an informal but real role as a liaison and go-between for the refuges and the charity that was helping them. Quentina liked that: it appealed to the side of her that enjoyed administering and running things, getting involved' [Lanchester 2012: 207].
Those of us who read and worked with Lanchester's novel will agree that one of the most remarkable novel plot lines in terms of inner struggles is that of Petunia Howe's daughter Mary who is condemning herself for her wish her mother dies quicker for Mary to come back to her normal life. Mary feels simultaneously shame and pain, powerlessness to stop mother's passing away and despair, Mary is cross with herself that she wants her mother dies quick, cross with the circumstances and full of pity towards Pertnia, herself, her family. It is one of the best plot lines in the novel in terms of psychological depth.
Let us look at one of the scenes in the hospice:
'Mary felt the pressure of being in the room, an agonizing sense of her loss, of her mother's death occurring in slow motion. At the same time , nothing was happening. Time seemed not to pass. Her mother, in approaching so close to death, had moved to a state of pure being. Mary found it hard just to be.
She thought: I am tired of this. My mother is going to die, and if she is going to die, I need it to be soon. It doesn't matter what she needs, any more; what matter is what I need. A voice in her head said: Mum, please, leave soon' [Lanchester 2012: 303].
Now, let us look at the extract from Faulks's novel:
'The taxi went down Albert Embankment, and Hassan looked out at the light along the Thames. He was not a soldier, he was not a jihadi or a terrorist or whatever term people might use. But was he still a believer? Had he failed even in that? It was too soon to say. His thoughts were too turbulent for him to be able to take stock of what he now thought. But something had happened on that bridge. Something more than the shock of almost being knocked down by a speeding cyclist...Something profound and real at that moment had changed in him, had shifted his axis; and it was never going back' [Faulks 2010: 385].
Here we again see the flow of inner world arranged as a chain of thoughts, self-questions, self-analysis, etc., which we call indirect speech -несобственно-авторская (несосбственно-прямая) речь - and which help the authot to put us in the 'mind' of a personage and to follow his estimation of himself nd the world round it. By the way, Faulks's novel gives us a chance to speak about a very good and a very English tradition, very well developed by Thackeray: synthesis of satire and psychological depicting .
Contemporary writers, on the one hand, inheriting their great predecessors, present a more complex mixture of prejudices, worries, believes, fears, memories and aspirations within each character, on the other hand - they are trying more than the writers of the previous literary times to hide themselves, in order to avoid direct influence a reader's judgments about a character as much as possible. As you know, the Victorian literature was a very much didactic one at its early stage, but the further the more George Eliot, George Meredith and others were looking for the ways of narration which help to camouflage their direct and open efforts to make a reader think of a character or a situation as he or she supposes a reader should think. The contemporary writers, Faulks and Lanchester are among them, are sure that accepting what is right and what is wrong, condemning and appraisal are absolutely dependant on the reader, though of course irony and satire, sometimes sarcasm and grotesque help us to understand what are the author's moral values which he or she establishes with the help of his or her characters.
Thus, it can be concluded that the tradition of the social novel in English literature is not interrupted in the early years of 2000 despite postmodernism invasion. It responds to the processes of globalization, internationalization and intercultural interaction and acquires new features. The intentions of the modern writers to reproduce contradictory, complex and acute processes of the reality, to draw attention to many questions of the formation of a new social structure, as well as new national identity, to speculate by means of the genre addressed the dynamics of the society as a single but multi-sided organism represented by diverse types, are realized
through the choice of the classical form of the social novel with its well-established themes, problems and poetics.
It can be summed up also that the works of modern British literature, in particular Sebastian Faulks's novels The Week in December and John Lan-chester's Capital as masterful examples, are a logical and natural and a very much artistic continuation of the classical tradition of the social novel in the national literature of Great Britain. The main characteristics of the genre are preserved in the poetics of contemporary works, enriched by artistic discoveries of the time. The classical formula of the social novel of the XIX century is no doubt enriched by these two novelists, its existence in the first decades of the new century should be considered a new important stage in the development of the genre in the national literature. What is more, these two novels and their authors' both deliberate and subconscious work within the Victorian novel traditions show the unity of the English literary process, demonstrate that social novel model exists in English culture as an essential and almost mandatory element for those who want to draw a picture of current social life.
Literature citied
A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks. A Commentary with annotations / edited by Karen Hewitt. Perm: Perm State University, 2012. 73 p.
Capital by John Lanchester. A Commentary with annotations / Edited by Karen Hewitt. Perm: Perm State University, 2016. 69 p.
Faulks, Sebastian. A Week in December. London, Vintage, 2010. 392 p.
Lanchester, John. Capital. London: Farber and Farber, 2013. 577 p.
Sebastian Faulks interview to the on-line newspaper Lenta.ru on 23.01.2017. URL: https://lenta.ru/articles/2017/01/23/speach/ (addressed 23.03.2017).
The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Literature / Edited by David Deidre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 267 p.
The Novel. Modern Essays in criticism /Edited by Robert Murray Davis. New Jersy: Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Clifs, 1969. 324 p.
The Victorians // Sphere History of Literature in the English Language / Edited by Arthur Pollard. London: Sphere Books, 1970. 592 p.
Wheeler M. English Fiction of the Victorian PeriodA 1830 - 1890. London: Longman, 1986. 292 p.
Woolf V. George Eliot // Woolf V. The Common Reader. Fifth Edition. London: Hogarth Press, 1941. P. 205-218.
ТРАДИЦИИ ВИКТОРИАНСКОГО СОЦИАЛЬНОГО РОМАНА В XXI ВЕКЕ: «НЕДЕЛЯ В ДЕКАБРЕ» СЕБАСТЬЯНА ФОКСА И «СТОЛИЦА» ДЖОНА ЛАНЧЕСТЕРА
Борис Михайлович Проскурнин
д. филол. н., профессор,
заведующий кафедрой мировой литературы и культуры
Пермский государственный национальный исследовательский университет
614990, Россия, Пермь, ул. Букирева, 15. bproskurnin@yandex.ru
Мария Игоревна Филипьева
магистр филологии,
преподаватель кафедры английского языка профессиональной коммуникации Пермский государственный национальный исследовательский университет 614990, Россия, Пермь, ул. Букирева, 15. maria_filipieva@mail.ru
Статья рассматривает произведения современных английских писателей С. Фокса и Дж. Ланчестера в свете развития и обогащения традиции социального романа, заложенной в национальной литературе ХУШ-Х1Х вв. Рассматриваются творческое использование основных жанровых принципов и средств социального романа, созданной викторианскими писателями, ее обогащение ее поэтики в творчестве современных авторов на материале двух романов - «Неделя в декабре» и «Столица».
Ключевые слова: английская литература, Себастьян Фокс, Джон Ланчестер, социальный роман, викторианская традиция.
