Life Made Real: Characterization in the Novel Since Proust and Joyce

"Creating people is a process in which all of us indulge, from the earliest age," writes Thomas F. Petruso; "one might say we constitute ourselves and others as characters, fashioning from our histories and inclinations the self-definitions we present to the world."
Petruso sees the masterworks of Proust and Joyce as perhaps the quintessential artistic expressions of this process. Against the grain of much of current literary theory, he allows these novels a powerful historical identity, approaching them as character-centered and essentially autobiographical narratives, as artful representations of real events in the inner and outer lives of the authors themselves.
Petruso's reaffirmation of history and of personal context within literature locates the novels of Joyce and Proust in a recognizable literary lineage, determining two kinds of contemporary novels to which they have given rise: subjective experiential works, and those that have developed the elements of formal structuring explored by the two authors.