The Art of the Novel

How do we reflect on the art and aesthetic of our victorian novels?

How do Wilde, Woolf, and Joyce reflect on the functioning of expression and perception?

Below are quotes from the authors and some critics on the writings of your respective authors.
Use them as a prompt to dissect the role of art and the artist in the context of history and the history of the novel.

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"Virginia Woolf's mature art concerns not the objects of vision in themselves but an investigation into the means of perception: the gap which intervenes between self and other, subject and object. To the Lighthouse looks at people in the act of looking. It examines the individual's eye-beam and reflects upon the colour of the personal light which leads one to interpret the self and the world in a certain way...When Virginia Woolf reinvented the novel, she was extending the boundaries of beauty... Abolishing chapter and verse, Virginia Woolf creates a rhythmic, wave-like form of undulating passage as in music, where the structure of parts within an individual movement is a continuous flow rather than a series of stops and starts. She identifies language itself as a volatile and indeterminate system of mirroring suggestions; reality as potentially unknowable, and the novel form as susceptible of radical transformation to accommodate these perspectives."
- from Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse, by Stevie Davies (London: Penguin, 1989).
http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~hartleyg/authors/modwoolf.html


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"The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the moralityof art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art...All art is at once surface and symbol.Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the workis new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree,the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a manfor making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it.The only excuse for making a useless thing is that oneadmires it intensely. All art is quite useless." - from preface
http://www.literaturecollection.com/a/wilde/doriangray/1/

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"Joyce's words, accurately described as having 'multiple roots,' shatter the linear unity of the word, even of language, only to posit a cyclic unity of the sentence, text, or knowledge."
- from A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari