Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel

"Breathes new life into the novelistic practice of description . . . focusing on one particular strand of Anglo-French literary modernism." ―Studies in the Novel

The modern novel, so the story goes, thinks poorly of mere description—what Virginia Woolf called "that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool." As a result, critics have largely neglected description as a feature of novelistic innovation during the twentieth century. Dora Zhang argues that descriptive practices were in fact a cru...