Thomas A. Laughlin has a PhD in English Literature from the University of Toronto. He has published articles on topics in nineteenth-century literature in The Henry James Review, Mediations, and Resilience. He lives in Toronto and works as a contract instructor at different universities in the surrounding area.
Thomas A. Laughlin
Contributions
The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction by Paul Stasi
Northrop Frye argued that behind every realist narrative was a displaced mythic structure that could explain the deeper meaning of its themes and patterns. Frye’s archetypal theory was in many ways a modernist one. Had not James Joyce and T. S. Eliot themselves sought to unify the seemingly random data of modern experience by indicating for their readers deep mythic structures undergirding their works? Myth was not held on to so much as a system of belief as for its ability to give a kind of formal unity—even if only latently—to the otherwise centrifugal force of the new and diverse material of modern life. In modernism, myth allied with literary form against the messy, debased business of daily existence in post-traditional society. But what if this is the wrong way to tell the story? This is the question posed by Paul Stasi in The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction, which discovers behind modernism not myth but the displaced form of the realist novel.