The Transformation of the Crowd in the British Society and the Rise of Modernist Novels

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26370304
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Literature in English
• Research Institution: Kwansei Gakuin University
• Principal Investigator: ITO Masanori 関西学院大学, 商学部, 教授 (10322976)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: イギリス小説 / 群集 / 労働運動 / 初期モダニズム / ジャーナリズム

Outline of Final Research Achievements

With focus on the representation of crowds in contemporary novels, this research investigated the relation between the transformation of the crowd in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British society and the rise and development of modernist literature. The chief achievements consist of discoveries concerning the group of workers appearing at the close of H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897), spectators of festivals from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), and the mass of people filling London streets from Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897). By referring to Gustave Le Bon’s crowd theory, I discovered that the formation of new crowds boosted by the popularization of newspapers had a great influence on the contemporary fictional language.

Free Research Field

イギリス文学