Author Description

"In early twentieth-century Britain, novelists including Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, May Sinclair, and J.D. Beresford believed that they knew and were able to express more about human behaviour than their Victorian predecessors. What gave them this confidence? Dynamic Psychology in Modernist British Fiction argues that it stemmed from their knowledge of pre-Freudian psychologies that mapped the mind in order to prove the existence of the soul. Psychologies developed by William James, William McDougall, Henri Bergson, Pierre Janet, and Frederic Myers articulated the nature of psychic reality, describing its movements and conflicts. Dynamic Psychology in Modernist British Fiction restores the significance of earlier psychological discourse, uses it to demonstrate continuity from the Edwardian to modernist novel, and generates fresh readings of British psychological fiction."--Jacket.