SOURCE: "Henry Green as Experimental Novelist," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XVI, No. 2, Summer, 1984, pp. 197-214.

In the following essay, Gibson examines Green's experiments with traditional conventions of the novel form in his fiction, comparing his novels to those of James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Franz Kafka.

The originality of Henry Green's experimental fiction has seldom been given its due. He has been deemed a modernist with little understanding of what his "modernism" actually involves, or what makes it peculiar to him. Critics like Stokes, Russell, and Tindall have called him (among other things) a "poetic" or a "symbolist" novelist. But terms like these minimize the differences between him and some of his predecessors or contemporaries. He has been readily grouped with Faulkner and—by Toynbee and Cosman, for instance—with Joyce and Virginia Woolf. In certain respects, however, it is the differences between his work and...