What promises to be a far more interesting work, Ulysses, now appearing in the Little Review, will have hazarded some theory of this nature as to Mr. Joyce’s intention. On our part, with such a fragment before us, it is hazarded rather than affirmed; but whatever the intention of the whole, there can be no question but that it is of the utmost sincerity and that the result, difficult or unpleasant as we may judge it, is undeniably important. In contrast with those whom we have called materialists, Mr. Joyce is spiritual; he is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickering of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain, and in order to preserve it he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious, whether it be probability, or coherence, or any other of these signposts which for generations have served to support the Imagination of a reader when called upon to imagine what he can neither touch nor see.
(1) A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, normally in prose, which is typically
published as a book.
The genre has been described as having “a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years”, with its origins in classical Greece and Rome, in medieval and early modern romance, and in the tradition of the novella. The latter, an Italian word for a short story to distinguish it from a novel, has been used in English since the 18th century for a work that falls somewhere in between.
(2) In the early 19 th century, the romantic novels had run the stage. There were different types of romance such as gothic novels, historical romance and other classical fictions. When came to Victorian Age, novel had come to a full thrive, and the new genre, known as critical realism,revealing the corruptions and rotten reality under the romantic ideas. In the 20 th century, artists and writers started to find new techniques and made lots of experiment, probing the new possibility of literature.