Michaela Praisler, ON MODERNISM, POSTMODERNISM AND THE NOVEL, Bucureti: Editura Didactic i Pedagogic. 2005.

183pp Modern and contemporary literature has long been the object of debate. Critics have emphasized its avant-garde nature and have pointed out the intricacies of its fabric, readers have dismissed it as either too innovative to be pleasing or as difficult and eclectic, students have coped but not actually got to grips with its discourse. Michaela Praislers book partly adds to the debate, partly informs and stimulates. It addresses philology undergraduates, offering them ideas about how to read the (post)modern novel, how to enjoy its strange experiments, and how to assess its value. In this it is intended to support the daring enterprise of teaching literature and to encourage reading in the era of texts being sooner browsed, listened to or watched rather than interacted with in the old fashioned way. On Modernism, Postmodernism and the Novel examines the main strands of twentieth-century fiction, including post-war, post-imperial and multicultural fiction. In so doing, it looks into the metamorphoses of novel modes of writing and challenges canonical patterns by shedding new light on generally recognised valuable contributors to the literary stage and by observing their latest reformulations with writers who still have to enter this exclusivist zone, but whose works clearly deserve our attention. In short, it focuses on the most popular of literary genres and is structured into two parts, which concentrate on the trends announced by the title and which develop from a theoretical base to individual writers and representative works. Inspired and necessary for a coherent survey of the twentieth century literary phenomenon and its contemporary hypostases, the choices operated are: Henry James, Edward Morgan Forster and Joseph Conrad (Early Modernism); Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and David Herbert Lawrence (Experimentalism); Angus Wilson and Kingsley Amis (The Angry Novel) Lawrence Durrell, John Fowles and David Lodge (Metafiction); Doris Lessing, Fay Weldon and Helen Fielding (Feminine/Feminist Fiction); Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro (Postcolonial Writing) The writers contribution to the novel is placed within the wider historical and cultural frame of the time of writing but, more importantly, of the time of their reception, with a view to pointing out the openness of interpretation, the multitude of possible interpretative strategies. Furthermore, the explicit and implicit core of their writings is accessed through the lens of major critical directions, thus having theory and practice come together and familiarising readers not only with the discourse of fiction, but with that of criticism also. Including a selection of Texts (excerpts from The Portrait of a Lady, A Passage to India, Heart of Darkness, Mrs. Dalloway, Ulysses, Sons and Lovers, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, Lucky Jim, The Alexandria Quartet, The French Lieutenants Woman, Changing Places, The Diaries of Jane Somers, Down Among the Women, Bridget Joness Diary, Midnights Children and The Remains of the Day), Michaela Praisler manages to put things into perspective, to illustrate that which has previously been stated with reference to style, diction, narrative practice and technique, to thus allow students to practice actual text analysis, guided along by Tasks which orient and facilitate the approach. The Useful Terminology section which precedes the Bibliography serves practically the same purposes, defining terms and giving examples. Neatly structured and pertinently presented, the volume touches on the most neuralgic of issues associated with the novelty of modernism and the controversy of postmodernism, constituting itself at once into an appealing course of lectures and a thought provoking collection of texts illustrative of the language of literature at its best. Having read Michaela

Praislers book, one is compelled to acknowledge that the novel has remained as purposeful and relevant form as it was one hundred years ago. Ioana Mohor-Ivan, Dunrea de Jos University of Galai