The Fictional Minds of Modernism

For many years Modernist narrative, whatever its form, has been considered as disruptive in its positing an„inward turn“ intended to provide a closer exploration of characters' beliefs, ideas and ruminations. According to the most traditional scholarship, Modernism leaves the external world behind in order to dive into the mental processes that give shape to human behavior. More recently, however, especially with the advent of cognitive studies, it has become increasingly clear that this inward turn constitutes in fact a different way of understanding the relation between the outer and the inner worlds of a subject. Historically, Modernism's solipsistic strategies have been often regarded as an egotistic response to the social and political pressures of the age. This collection wants to demonstrate, in various contexts and nationalities, how those strategies were also a way of examining the pychological potential and limitaions of the human mind when it comes not only to interpreting and evaluating, but also apprehending the phenomena of the real world.