The Experimental Impulse in George Meredith’s Fiction

This book argues that George Meredith as a writer of Victorian fiction is most critical for us today because of the ways in which he wrote against convention. The focus is on ‘An Essay on Comedy’ and six novels - ‘The Ordeal of Richard Feverel,’ ‘The Adventures of Harry Richmond,’ ‘The Egoist,’ ‘One of Our Conquerors,’ ‘Lord Ormont and His Aminta,’ and ‘The Amazing Marriage’ - all of which illuminate the experimental and transgressive impulse in Meredith, as seen in his treatment of controversial contemporary themes, in his departures from conventions of genre, and in his innovations with narrative technique and the representation of consciousness. These are novels that had a profoundly stimulating effect on many of those canonical writers we now associate with the first wave of modernism in the English novel. James, and then Woolf, Forster, Lawrence, Conrad, Ford, and Joyce, to varying degrees, all saw Meredith as an influence to be reckoned with in their own novelistic experimentation - an influence, this book proposes, essential to understanding the modernist translation of nineteenth-century realism into new formal, thematic, and psychological realms.