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08 Literary Narrative Fiction

08 Literary Narrative Fiction. History, Genres, Analysis. Narratives. Personal, political, historical, legal, medical narratives: narrative’s power to capture certain truths and experiences in special ways

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08 Literary Narrative Fiction

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  1. 08 Literary Narrative Fiction History, Genres, Analysis

  2. Narratives Personal, political, historical, legal, medical narratives: narrative’s power to capture certain truths and experiences in special ways - unlike other modes of explanation and analysis such as statistics, descriptions, summaries, or reasoning via conceptual abstractions

  3. The spectrum of fiction fact – fiction – truth? History Realism Romance Fantasy Realism vs romance: a matter of perception vs a matter of vision two principal ways fiction can be related to life Realism Romance

  4. Literary narrative fiction literature: art of language kinds of Iiterature: poetry, drama, narrative fiction prose: from Latin prosa or proversaoratio =‘straightforward discourse’ M. Jourdain: I've been speaking in PROSE all along! Moliere (1622-1673), Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme

  5. Literary conventions an agreement between artist and audience as to the significance of features appearing in a work of art knowledge of conventions = literary competence narrative: tells of real or imagined events; tells a story fiction: an imagined creation in verse/prose/drama story: (imagined) events or happenings, involving a conflict plot: arrangement of action → structure

  6. Literary, narrative, fictional: distinct features, do not presuppose each other • Where do we place lyric poetry? Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory.Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP, 1991

  7. Literary, narrative, fictional:

  8. The history of fiction • Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957) • Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel (1988) • Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (1996)

  9. NovelIn: J. A. Cuddon: Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London: Penguin, 1999 Derived from Italian novella, 'tale, piece of news‘ applied to a wide variety of writings only common attribute is that they are extended pieces of prose fiction The length of novels varies greatly when is a novel not a novel or a long short-story or a short novel or a novella? Fewer and fewer rules in contemporary practice a novel is between 60-70.000 words and, say, 200.000.

  10. CuddonNovel The actual term 'novel' has had a variety of meanings and implications at different stages. From roughly the 15th to the 18th c. its meaning tended to derive from the Italian novella and the Spanish novela (the French term nouvelle, is closely related) The term (oftenused in a plural sense) denoted short stories or tales of the kindone finds in Boccaccio's Decameron (c. 1349 51).Nowadays we would classify all the contents of these as short stories.

  11. CuddonNovel /novelty The term denoted a prose narrative about characters and their actions in what was recognizably everyday life and usually in the present, with the emphasis on things being 'new' or a 'novelty'. It was used in contradistinction to 'romance'. In the 19th c.the concept of 'novel' was enlarged.

  12. CuddonNovel A form of story or prose narrative containing characters, actionand incident and, perhaps, a plot

  13. CuddonNovel The form - susceptible to change and development Pliable andadaptable to a seemingly endless variety oftopic and themes A wide range of sub-species or categories.

  14. CuddonNovel The subject matter of the novel eludes classification. A number of these classifications shade off into each other. For example, psychological novel is a term which embraces many books; proletarian, propaganda and thesis novels tend to have much in common; the picaresque narrative is often a novel of adventure; a saga novel may also be a regional novel.

  15. CuddonNovel The origins of the genre are obscure but in the time of the XIIth Dynasty Middle Kingdom (c. 1200BC) Egyptians were writing fiction of a kind which one woulddescribe as a novel today

  16. CuddonNovel From Classical times Daphnis and Chloe (2nd c. BC) by Longus The Golden Ass (2nd c. AD) by Apuleius Satyricon (1st c. AD) of Petronius Arbiter Most of these are concerned with loveand contain the rudiments of novels as we understand themtoday

  17. CuddonNovel Oriental prose fiction Arabian Nights‘ Entertainments, or The Thousand and One Nights, 10th c. the collection, collected and established as a group of stories probably by an Egyptian professional story-teller at some time between the 14th and 16th c. Became known in Europe early in the 18th c., since when they have had a considerable influence.

  18. CuddonNovel Collections of novella or short tales Italy - Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron(1349–52, revised 1370–1371) had much influence on Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (late 14th c.) Matteo Bandello’s Le Novelle (written between 1510and 1560) France - Marguerite of Navarre‘Heptaméron (published in 1558) These were integrated short stories but important as they were in prose In their method of narration and in their creation and development ofcharacter they are forerunners of the modern novel

  19. CuddonNovel Until the 14th c. most of the literature of entertainment (and the novel is usually intended as an entertainment) was confined to narrative verse, particularly the epic and the romance. Romance eventually yielded the word roman, which is the term for novel in most European languages. In some ways the novel is a descendant of the medieval romances, which, in the first place, like the epic, were written in verse and then in prose (e.g. Malory's Morte D'Arthur, 1485). Verse narratives had been supplanted by prose narratives by the end of the 17th c.

  20. CuddonNovel Spain - was ahead of the rest of Europe in the development of thenovel form. Cervantes's DonQuixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615)satirized chivalry anda number of the earlier novels In France Rabelais'sGargantua (1534) and Pantagruel (1532) can beclassed as novels of phantasy, or mythopoeic

  21. CuddonNovel England, end of the 15th c., extended prose narrative: John Lyly's Euphues (in two parts, 1578 and 1580 Sir Philip Sidney's pastoral romance Arcadia (1590). 1719 – Daniel Defoe published his story of adventure Robinson Crusoe, one in a long tradition of desert island fiction Defoe's other two main contributions to the novel form were Moll Flanders (1722), a sociological novel, and AJournal of the PlagueYear (1722) – a reconstruction and thus a piece of historical fiction

  22. Bookson Fiction Booth, Wayne: The Rhetoric of Fiction. Second edition. London: Penguin, 1991 (1983) Lodge, David: The Art of Fiction. London: Penguin, 1992 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith: Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London and New York: Methuen, 1983

  23. Sub-genres Integrated short stories Arabian Nights' Entertainments, or The Thousand and One Nights, Boccaccio: Decameron James Joyce: Dubliners

  24. Sub-genres Romance any sort of stroy of chivalry or of love Cervantes: Don Quixote (1605-1615) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (14th c.) Thomas Malory: Le Morte D’Arthur (15th c.) Pastoral romance Longus: Daphnis and Chloe (2nd c. A.D.) Philip Sidney: Arcadia (1590) Anti-pastoral: Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d’Urbevilles (1891), Jude the Obscure (1895)

  25. Sub-genres Picaresque novel tells the life of a knave or a picaroon who is the servant of severel masters Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders (1722) Henry Fielding: Jonathan Wild (1743)

  26. Sub-genres Novel of adventure / desert island novel (related to te picaresque novel and the romance) Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe (1719) R.L. Stevenson: Treasure Island (1883) Mark Twain: Tom Sawyer (1876) Huckleberry Finn (1885) James Fenimore Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans (1826)

  27. Sub-genres Gothic novel a type of romance, popular from the 1760s until the 1820s, has terror and cruelty as main themes, impact on the ghost story and the horror story Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764 Ann Radcliffe: Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818) Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey (1818) Charles Dickens: Great Expectations (1861) R. L. Stevenson: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) Dracula, doppelgänger

  28. Sub-genres Epistolary novel in the form of letters, popular in the 18th c. Samuel Richardson: Pamela (1740) and Clarissa Harlowe (1747, 1748) Tobias Smollett: Humphrey Clinker (1771)

  29. Sub-genres Sentimental novel / novel of sentimentality popular in the 18th c., distresses of the virtuous Samuel Richardson: Pamela (1740) Oliver Goldsmith: The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) Sentimentality in fiction Laurence Sterne: A Sentimental Journey (1768)

  30. Sub-genres Historical novel a form of fictional narrative which reconstructs history imaginatively Walter Scott: Waverly (1814) William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair (1847-48) Robert Graves: I, Claudius (1934) William Golding: Rites of Passage (1980)

  31. Sub-genres Documentary novel based on documentary evidence in the shape of newspapee article, etc. Truman Capote: In Cold Blood (1966) Graham Greene: The Quiet American (1955)

  32. Sub-genres Key novel actual persons are presented under fictitious names Aldous Huxley: Point Counter Point (1928) (D. H. Lawrence)

  33. Sub-genres Thesis / sociological / propaganda novel treats of a social, political, religious problem Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) The condition of England novel /regional novel Charles Dickens: Hard Times (1854) Charlotte Brontë: Shirley (1849)

  34. Sub-genres Utopia [gr. Ou + topos = no place and eutopia = place where all is well] Thomas More: Utopia (1516) George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels (1726, 1735) William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954) Anti-utopia, dystopia Science fiction Phantasy or fantasy

  35. Sub-genres Campus novel has a university campus as setting Mary McCarthy: The Groves of Academe (1952) Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim (1954) David Lodge: Changing Places (1975)

  36. Sub-genres The saga / chronicle novel narrative about the life of a large family John Galsworthy: Forsyte Saga (1906-1921)

  37. Sub-genres Time novel employs stream of consciousness technique, time is used as a theme James Joyce: Ulysses (1922) Marcel Proust: A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927)

  38. Sub-genres Psychological novel concerned with emotional, mental lives of the characters Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway (1925)

  39. Building blocks of narrative • types of character (»roles) • types of event • types of lack and restoration • types of getting from beginning to end (How do you know it is the end of the story?) • types of setting • types of narrator

  40. Characters characterization:round vs flat characters E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel stereotypes: characters based on conscious or unconscious cultural assumptions that sex, age, ethnic or national identification, occupation, marital status and so on, are predictably accompanied by certain character traits, actions, even values

  41. Arrangement of events • with a particular kind of beginning and ending orientation, closure, coda • usually told for a purpose • typically about change: situation A changes to situation B lack leads to restoration

  42. Structure structure: connecting elements, repetition, parallelism selection, connection, ordering of information leading to a recognition moving to illuminate the beginning by the ending

  43. Setting The space where the narrative takes place: rural setting, urban setting, nature scenes, country houses etc. Settings often echo or emphasize other features: Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847) Yorkshire moors Wuthering Heights↔Thrushcross Grange EarnshawsLintons harsh, rough warm, soft, civilised

  44. Space and Time James Joyce, Ulysses (1922) Dublin, 16 June 1904 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925) London, a single day in June, after WWI

  45. Narrator, narration narrator:one who tells a story within/outside the space and time of story Who tells the story? To whom? Why? How? narration: narrative perspective: point of view author ≠ author's persona (mask) ≠ narrator (Samuel Clemens vs Mark Twain)

  46. Narrator, narration, narrative • account of a sequence of connected events • told by a narrator what happened vs how it is told 'story''narration' Narration - rearranges the order of events e.g., flashback: historical time vs narrated order - sets up relations between events e.g., cause and effect

  47. Narrative perspective • viewing aspect: focus like a movie camera: choosing, framing, emphasizing, distorting limited/unlimited (omniscient narrator) stand back: dramatic focus • verbal aspect: voice

  48. Point of view • visual perspective • ideological framework • basic types of narration: 1st person (I-narration) 3rdperson (they-narration) e.g., 'window' on text: seems objective internal vs external restricted knowledge vs unrestricted knowledge (seemed, looked as if) • texts with instability of point of view: watch out for WHO experiences and WHAT is experienced

  49. Focalization • external focalization: unidentified narrator • character focalization: a character experiences focalizer: the one who is looking focalized: what is being focussed on expression and construction of types of consciousness and self-consciousness Shifting narrative viewpoints, several narrators: Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)

  50. Narratology The study of narrative in literature Early examples in the 20th century: Vladimir Propp (Russian Formalist) Morphology of the Folktale (1928) Claude Lévi-Strauss (French Structuralist) Anthropologie Structurale (1958) (myths) Gérard Genette Narrative Discourse (1972)

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