This book investigates the entire spectrum of techniques for portraying the mental lives of fictional characters in both the stream-of-consciousness novel and other fiction. Each chapter deals with one main technique, illustrated from a wide range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction by writers including Stendhal, Dostoevsky, James, Mann, Kafka, Joyce, Proust, Woolf, and Sarraute.
Dorrit Cohn is Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.
"I am willing to predict that Transparent Minds will serve the present generation of graduate students the way Frye's Anatomy of Criticism served a preceding one."—Marilyn Gaddis Rose, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature
"A lucid, thoroughgoing analysis of the novelist's art, a study that not only reveals the grammatical and stylistic scaffolding on which character is built, but also imparts new insights into individual characters and the works in which they appear. A truly outstanding accomplishment."—William Riggan, World Literature Today
"This is a book of international stature that cuts through to an understanding of one of the central aspects of 'modernism.' I long to hand it to my students."—David Hayman, University of Wisconsin