By examining the works of George Eliot, Carlyle, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, George Meredith, George Gissing, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, and D.H. Lawrence, as well as several post-World War II novels, Argyle explores the Goethean ideal of Bildung and the Bildungsroman (self-culture and the apprenticeship novel), Heinrich Heine's anti-philistinism, music, the Tübingen higher criticism, Schopenhauer's and Nietzsche's philosophies, Prussianism, and avant-garde culture in the Weimar Republic. To establish the status of these allusions in the public conversation, Argyle moves between literary and extra-literary contexts, including biographical material about the authors as well as information from contemporary literary works, periodical articles, and other documentation that indicates the understanding authors could assume from their readers. Her methodology combines theories of allusion and intertextuality with reception theory.

York University

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"Invaluable work, extremely well documented, knowledgeable, clearly written and organized - in short, a significant contribution to our understanding of the English novel. I know of nothing else like it." Allan Pasco, author of Allusion: A Literary Graft "Sound scholarship. With admirable thoroughness, Argyle identifies and describes the many allusions in English fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that bear on the English authors' interest in German writers whose works have served as models of cultural critique or generic development." Robert O'Kell, Department of English, University of Manitoba