Download or read book Catastrophe and Imagination written by John McCormick and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 1971 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Catastrophe and Imagination explores fiction in America and England from 1870 to 1950, measuring the impact of the twentieth century's wars on the literary imagination. McCormick holds that the novel has a unique relationship to society, and defines this in relation to the many catastrophes of his era - wars, revolutions, and other outrages on the social order. After an initial survey of society in the novels of Jane Austen, Dickens, and Thackeray, to name only a few, he analyzes what the novel is not, with reference to the work of Virginia Woolf, John Steinbeck, and D. H. Lawrence.