Making Conversation in Modernist Fiction

<div><i>Making Conversation in Modernist Fiction </i>examines the role of character dialogue in key works of Anglo-American modernism. Through close analysis of texts including <i>The Ambassadors The Sun Also Rises </i>The Dead <i>The Sound and the Fury Absalom Absalom! The Waves Between the Acts </i>Melanctha and <i>Cane </i>the book documents the ways in which some of the most canonical British and American modernist authors transformed the conventions traditionally used to render talk in fiction.<br> If historically dialogue had been treated as a subordinate element in fiction-a tool for developing character or advancing plot-this book demonstrates that writers such as Henry James Ernest Hemingway James Joyce William Faulkner Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein would increasingly emphasize it as a poetic structure in its own right. In this way Alsop argues modernist writers make conversation in radically new ways and for a diverse range of expressive and communicative ends. Over the course of five chapters that explore this previously overlooked avenue of modernist innovation <i>Making Conversation</i> offers readers a radical new paradigm not only for understanding fictional talk but also for interpreting some of the most celebrated examples of early twentieth-century narrative.<br>  </div>