TEMPORAL AND SPATIAL UNITY IN THE NOVEL-SEQUENCES OF DOROTHY RICHARDSON AND LAWRENCE DURRELL

Abstract

As I was browsing in Twentieth-century fiction studies in an attempt to find a topic for my PH.D. project, a peculiar phenomenon caught my attention. I noticed the considerable number of novels composed of more than one volume. I set out to study what I, then, called the "novel-sequence" or "roman-flueve" phenomenon. I started by exploring the ancestry of this form in the history of English fiction. The first example can be traced as far back as the Seventeenth Century. John Bunyan (1628-88) published the two parts of The Pilgrim's Progress in 1678 and 1684 respectively. As J.W. Mackai1 suggests, these may be regarded as an English prose Illiad and Odyssey. Part One is an epic; Part Two is a romance. One is a dream­ story; the other is a continuation of the dream. I found other multi-volume-novel writers much later in the Nineteenth Century. Disraeli (1804-81), in his "Young England" trilogy Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847), offers his proposed solution to the "Condition-of-England" problem: a return to some imagined medievalism; a new Toryism.