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Barbara Pym's Narrative Intersections, Jennifer J. Beard

Doctoral Dissertations

The project of this dissertation is to place Barbara Pym's realism in the context of modernism, anti-modernism, and postmodernism in the twentieth-century English novel. My argument is not that Pym is a late modernist or that she is, per se, a long-lost Postmodernist. She is a realist who has learned the lessons of the former and whose traditional, linear narratives are punctuated by moments of awareness to the fragmented nature of identity and by blips of authorial acknowledgement and even laughter over the simultaneous separation and blending of the text world in which characters live with the "real" worlds of …