The spirit of revolt is much more marked in the fiction than in the poetry of the last decade of the century. This revolt in fiction is, according to Moody and Lovett, two-fold:
(i) First, there is the tendency to, “restore the spirit of romance to the novel.” This tendency is shown by such novelists as Conrad, Stevenson, Barrie and Kipling.
(ii) Secondly, there are writers like H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and Galsworthy who, “regarded the novel as a social document, and in some cases as a medium of propaganda.” Previous to them such Victorian novelists as George Eliot, Charles Reade and Charles Kingsley had also used the novel as a medium of social reform.
But what distinguishes the social critics and propagandists of the nineties, “are the severity of their criticism and the depth of their antipathy to the age in which they had grown up and which they chose to depict.” Their criticism is more thorough; they criticize the very fundamentals of the social fabric.