In his 1999 debut novel, Ghostwritten, David Mitchell has writer Louisa Rey telephone a late-night radio talk show, where she offers her opinion on the relationship between author and their work. What she says encapsulates a sense which guides Mitchell and many other writers who strive to redefine the novel across the twentieth century. For Rey, ‘the human world is made of stories, not people’ and ‘the people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed’ (386). Where the traditional novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is built of individuated characters shaped by innate attributes and internal desires, for Mitchell and many before him, this model is fundamentally flawed. The circumstances which lead a given person to have an idea, to have a story to tell, are multifarious and circumstantial as well as imperfectly recollected and perceived. Insight, as a feeling, is often the product of oversight, of a failure to appreciate the external triggers of an apparently personal breakthrough. Across the twentieth century, this book argues, a succession of writers have rejected the individuated character and the narratives of personal development which stem from it. Critical paradigms bound to the novel as fundamentally individualistic have failed to perceive these challenges to the novel's assumed basic unit and have thus struggled to address a major trajectory in its development across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

The writers this study focuses upon approach character as porous in its boundaries, changing with the often unbidden inflow and outflow of ideas. For most, the porous self is informed by theories of psychic connection: telepathy and other models of psychic connection are an explicit presence both in their novels and in their wider writings about the nature of self. Many writers in the early and mid-twentieth century were among the large numbers who believed that telepathy and other psychic faculties had been experimentally proven, either by the tests conducted by the Society for Psychical Research around the turn of the century, or the many laboratory trials of J. B. Rhine at Duke University in the 1930s. Such convictions are the function of a climate in which reputable publications were ready to cast the evidence in favour of telepathy as compelling.