Knowledge, Theory of, in literature

Charles G. Finney’s 1936 novel The Circus of Dr. Lao was published to
enthusiastic reviews, but fell into relative obscurity shortly thereafter. Since its
publication, it has been the subject of one peer-reviewed critical essay, a number of
reviews, one non-peer-reviewed essay, and a master’s thesis. It was published in a world
where the fantastic and unique found only barren desert soil, with no scholarly tradition
for the fantastic, nor a widely receptive lay audience for something truly unique, or sui
generis. The concept of the sui generis, meaning “of its own kind,” provides a useful lens
for examining the novel, as Finney develops not only creatures, but people, which are
truly of their own kind, borrowing from existing mythologies, traits of humanity, and
aspects of nature, recombining them in a singular way which resists classification.

This study of three novels by Virginia Woolf---Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves---examines the various narrative techniques Woolf employs to construct her concept of character in the modernist novel, and also considers her related assumptions about the multiple dimensions of identity. As Woolf questions whether life and reality are "very solid or very shifting," she generates a series of framing devices---such as mirrors, portraits, dinner parties, and narratives---that acknowledge a solid, visible, and structured reality within the frame amidst a shifting, invisible, and unstructured reality outside it. Woolf's attention to the operation of the frame as simultaneously facing inward and outward enables her to umbrella this contradistinction of elements in her expression of identity. This analysis of Woolf's orchestration of multiple framed perspectives and images evidences her visionary contributions to studies in narrative and human character.

Charles Finney's The Circus of Dr. Lao, published in 1936, has been widely read in the last eighty years and has influenced significant authors in the field of fantasy, yet it has been examined in just three critical studies in that time. This study examines Finney's novel as an epistemological fantasy, a heretofore undefined term that precipitates an epistemological crisis of knowing and certainty. The novel opens a way for fantasy literature to establish itself in a Modernist landscape by foregrounding the marvelous and extraordinary knowledge that lies just outside the realm of human experience. Finney presents Dr. Lao's circus as a surrogate model of success, and while many of the characters in the novel are unable to accept the truth offered them by the beings of fantasy, the author uses their experiences to satirize the complacencies he witnessed upon returning to America from the Far East in the 1930s.