Contemporary Literary Criticism | Of Human Bondage Maugham, W. Somerset - Dorothy Brewster and Angus Burrell (essay date October 1930)

Dorothy Brewster and Angus Burrell (essay date October 1930)

SOURCE: "Time Passes," in Adventure or Experience: Four Essays on Certain Writers and Readers of Novels, Columbia University Press, 1930, pp. 39-75.

[Brewster was an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt, part of a longer essay illuminating the differences between "chronicle" novels and "dramatic" novels, Brewster and Burrell classify Of Human Bondage as a dramatic novel, citing what they consider the reader's ability to sympathize with the self-pitying, imperfect Philip Carey.]

Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage is no family chronicle, no slow birth to death progression. Its very title suggests an emotional involvement, a struggle for escape, that promises a dramatic development. Fill out the title from Spinoza's Ethics—"Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions"—and one is prepared for a plunge into some intense form of human...

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