ABSTRACT
What modernist writers largely rebelled against in the texts of their nineteenth-century predecessors was what they saw as the complacent moral certainty and over-rational coherence that seemed to underpin plot structure, narrative perspective and characterisation in realist novels. They did not, by and large, reject the very possibility that literary art could produce some form of knowledge of reality, however elusive and uncircumscribed the real had come to seem. During the second half of the twentieth century, however, a new theoretical understanding of what constitutes reality developed, undermining far more radically the rational grounds of Enlightenment values and the expressive form of realism. This new perspective was both anti-realism and antihumanism. The new paradigm wholly rejects the human capacity for knowledge creation, recognising instead the constituting force of an impersonal system of language to construct the only sense of reality we can ever achieve. Our intuitive, commonsensical view of language is that words refer to a pre-existing reality beyond linguistics; words are the means by which we transmit or reproduce experience and knowledge of the physical and social worlds. Clearly this is the view of language informing the narrative voice of Daniel Deronda with its confidently detailed account of a specific social world. In this sense, language tends to be thought of as somehow transparent; we look through the words, as it were, to the actuality they point to.
