Words and worlds: form and the novel

One of the paradoxes of any artistic process is the transformation of the intensities of thought and sensation into the empirical fixities of form. For novelists, the sentence, paragraph and chapter are the standard textual forms that represent the richness of character, setting and event, and the insights into human nature they embody. In this paper I draw on approaches from literature, painting and poststructuralist philosophy to investigate the process by which words become worlds.