Time and Spirit

Zeitgeist which could be read as ‘the spirit of the age’ or ‘the spirit of the times,’ is a term introduced by the German Romantic writers, Johann Gottfried Herder in particular, and popularised by Hegel's philosophy of history. In The Oxford English Dictionary we read that zeitgeist is the ‘spirit or genius which marks the thought or feeling of a period or age.’ I am referring to the term not only because it could be useful in formulating a statement concerning the influx of life-writing genres at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, but also because it was deliberately used by David Lodge in the ‘acknowledgements’ part of his novel Author, Author in relation to (non)coincidental appearance of several novels which dealt with the life and oeuvre of Henry James.

The first chapter of the present study investigates a considerable increase in the interest in biographical fiction. There is no doubt that this trend in contemporary fiction, without precedence in the whole history of literature, could be referred to as zeitgeist – the general intellectual and cultural climate which resurrects the concepts of life, self, identity and authorship – previously expelled from the literary discourse by the preachers of Deconstruction and Post-structuralism. But, on a much smaller scale, zeitgeist could be used in an attempt to describe and understand the specific situation of the publishing market in 2004 when the literary world was offered multiple resurrections of Henry James in the form of James-based or James-influenced novels.