My essay on the fiction of Henry Green at The Quarterly Conversation:
Contemplating Green’s body of work more closely, however, reveals that even to the extent that Green was willing to work loosely within the confines of this important mode of English fiction, his novels simultaneously seek to escape, enlarging the scope of the “manners” portrayed, expanding the formal range of the scenic method, disturbing assumptions about the role of “voice” in fiction. If Green’s fiction finally doesn’t entirely leave the formal ambit of the novel of manners, it does stretch and reshape its conventions. This use of the form to alter its own usual habits, to determine possibilities not yet realized, is what most warrants considering Green an “experimental” writer. Literally Green’s novels explore new ways to test the limits of the presumed norms that novels must observe for them to be fully intelligible.
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