The second section turns to contemporary prose narratives, with attention to Knut Hamsun, Oscar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Henry James, George Egerton, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, and Joseph Conrad, to ask what writers working in the novel, novella, and short-story forms were doing to contest prevailing expectations about represented persons. Inconsistency, bad faith, fragmentation, and unconscious motives creep into the character spaces of these fictions. Character description recedes and Descriptions disintegrate; a penumbral negativity intrudes just where identification and sympathy might have been achieved.
Ultimately, Julian Murphet proposes that the 'modern character' emerging over this decade and a half presents a radical rethinking of a venerable category of narrative and dramatic art, with profound consequences for the coming century.
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