Diversion to Internal Reality in Modernist Fiction : A Study of Selected Texts

In her essay "Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown " the English female novelist Virginia Woolf famously wrote or announced : " On or about December, 1910 human character changed" ( 1950, 96 ). Actually, characters in fiction change too , and many critics take this date as the manifesto of the modernist era in literature and arts in England and Europe. Baruch Hochman , therefore , states that " modernism in the novel took hold shortly after 1910 " ( 1983 , 11 ) Warren Friedman ,similarly ,writes : " Woolf had in mind revolutions occurring at the time not only in all the arts but also in the way man thinks of his universe , his social organizations , and himself " , and adds : " She was in fact , heralding what came to be known as the age of modernism " ( 1975 , 3 ). This paper explores the narrative world of modernist fiction in an attempt to crystallize the new approaches to characterization adopted by four major modernist novelists; Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 – 1881 ), Virginia Woolf ( 1882 – 1941 ) , James Joyce ( 1882 – 1941 ) and D.H. Lawrence ( 1885 – 1930 ) .