Title: Authorial divinity in the twentieth century : omniscient narration in Woolf, Hemingway, and others /
Authors: Olson, Barbara K.
Publisher: Bucknell University Press ; Associated University Presses,
Year: 1997
Subjects: Woolf, Virginia, Technique.; Hemingway, Ernest, Technique.; Fiction History and criticism; Omniscience (Theory of knowledge); Point of view (Literature); Narration (Rhetoric); Fiction Technique; Narration (Rhetoric) History
Abstract: Whatever a writer's religious assumptions and histories, the literary device of omniscient narration traps a writer into a pose as God, at least some sort of God, be it one the writer eschews, avows, or longs for. In this study, Barbara K. Olson examines the relationship between both the writer and the omniscient narrator to God. Olson explains how modernists Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf both illustrate how authors' particular styles of omniscience bear a reliable though variable relation to their own or their culture's particular conceptions of God.
Contents: 1. Authorial Divinity: Historical and Theoretical Considerations -- 2. "I Don't Like to Write Like God": Hemingway's Omniscient Narration -- 3. "Who Thinks It?" Process Theism and Woolf's Omniscient Narration -- 4. Authorial Divinity: Concluding Considerations.