Moon Tiger | Literary Precedents

Moon Tiger Literary Precedents

This novel shows the strong influence of modernism. As did her modernist forebears, Lively here uses fractured chronology and multiple points of view to emphasize the subjective nature of experience and the nonlinear nature of personal time. The book is a good example of the trend toward spatialization that critic Joseph Frank (in his landmark 1945 essay, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature") sees as a major legacy of modernism. Rather than a chronologically unfolding sequence of actions — the structure of the traditional realist novel — Moon Tiger is a static, recursive, self-reflexive portrait of an individual's consciousness.