Hours In A Library - Softcover

Leslie Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0461334933 ISBN 13: 9780461334937

Publisher: HardPress, 2021

Synopsis

Hours In A Library by Leslie Stephen offers a critical survey of major novelists and their art, tracing a path from the English and French traditions that shaped modern fiction. The collection examines Defoe’s power of verisimilitude, Richardson’s epistolary technique and moral aims, and Pope’s moralism and literary craft, before moving to Walter Scott’s romantic historicism, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Puritan sensibility, and Balzac’s panoramic, sometimes sensational, portrait of society. Across these essays, Stephen assesses how each writer handles truth, imitation, character, and social context, weighing strengths against limits and considering how narrative form influences ethical meaning. He juxtaposes English and Continental writers to illuminate shifts in realism, psychology, and narrative responsibility, while reflecting on the evolving purposes of fiction—whether to instruct, to illuminate social life, or to illuminate the human heart through art. In sum, Hours In A Library combines close reading, biographical insight, and historical perspective to chart the emergence of modern prose fiction and its perennial tensions between truth, artistry, and morality.

Edition details

• Publisher: HardPress
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0461334933
• ISBN 13: 9780461334937
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416