Description - Dynamic Psychology in Modernist British Fiction by George M. Johnson
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. Through their exploration of hysteria, multiple personalities, and psychological time a new view of selfhood emerged. Their compelling case studies of extensions of human capacity, including telepathy, clairvoyance and automatic writing, helped to legitimate these psychical phenomena and made it possible for novelists to consider them within a construct of Realism. Exposure to pre-Freudian psychologies shaped these novelist's attitudes to Freud's theories, typically perceived as reductionist.
Nevertheless, literary historians have paid undue attention to psychoanalysis' impact. 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.
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