The Lyrical Novel: Studies in Herman Hesse, Andre Gide, and Virginia Woolf

The author, in defining the genre of "lyrical fiction," separates a type of .fiction that can be legitimately viewed as "poetry" from other narrative types. The lyrical novelist uses fictional devices to find an aesthetic expression for experience, achieving an effect most frequently seen in dreams, picaresques, and allegories. Analyzing representative novels by Hermann Hesse, Andre Gide, and Virginia Woolf, Ralph Freedman focuses on the problem of self-consciousness. His findings are directly applicable to much twentieth-century fiction.