THE INTERNATIONAL NOVEL: ASPECTS OF ITS DEVELOPMENT IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WITH EMPHASIS ON THE WORK OF NADINE GORDIMER AND V. S. NAIPAUL (South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago)

Many twentieth-century works of fiction reflect in their content, characters and settings the age of revolutions, uprootedness and aridity in which they were produced. These works yield to profitable analysis when examined collectively as aspects of a sub-genre called the international novel. The tradition of the international novel can be traced from at least Henry James' The American through E. M. Forster's Passage to India and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Nostromo to novels of the late twentieth century such as Nadine Gordimer's A Guest of Honour, The Conservationist and Burger's Daughter and V. S. Naipaul's Guerrillas and A Bend in the River.; The subject of international novels is revolution, their characters are typically marginal figures caught in between cultures or worlds in conflict and their settings underscore the nature of those conflicts. The revolutions which are the content of international novels may be born out of belief in an ideal as in Burger's Daughter or marked by nihilism and violence as in Nostromo. The heroes who confront these international dilemmas find themselves torn between the old and the new. Whether they are intruders or intruded upon, colonizers or the colonized, they live at the edges of their respective cultures. Their tragic condition is the ironic result of their ability to see flaws in both the world from which they have come and the world which lies before them. Caught as they are in the contest between the familiar and the strange, and able to compare and discriminate more than ordinary men and women, they are victims of the age or times in which they live.; The geography of international novels in which images of decay and chaos contrast with images of growth and order tells its own story of the struggle between the possessors of the land and the dispossessed. The sympathy of the landscape reinterprets the causes and outcomes of the revolutions and reveals the unstable condition of the marginal men and women who participate in them.