Transcript Story, Plot, Narrative Voice

10 Literary Narrative Fiction
Genres of Narrative Fiction;
History of the Form
Dickens Bicentenary
Teachers’ resources:
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/dickens
Literary events:
http://literature.britishcouncil.org/projects/
2011/dickens-2012
Student website for info:
http://dublin.studenty.me/2012/02/07/whatthe-dickens-is-dickens-2012/
Dickens Bicentenary Continued
Celebration on 19 December:
a live-streamed audience with Lucinda dickens
Hawksley, Great-Great-Great-Granddaughter
of Charles Dickens
http://audiencewithlucindadickenshawksley.eve
ntbrite.com/
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
The spectrum of fiction
fact – fiction – truth?
History
Realism Romance
Romance Fantasy
Realism vs romance: a matter of perception
vs a matter of vision
2 principal ways fiction can be related to life
Literary narrative fiction
literature: art of language
kinds of Iiterature: poetry,
drama,
narrative fiction
prose: from Latin prosa or proversa oratio
=‘straightforward discourse’
M. Jourdain: I've been speaking in PROSE all along!
Moliere (1622-1673), Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
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
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
Literary, narrative, fictional:
examples
literary
narrative
fictional
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Lit. narr. fict.
Nonlit. nonnarr.
nonfiction
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)
Novel
In: 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 6070.000 words and, say, 200.000.
Cuddon
Novel
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 (often used in a plural sense) denoted short stories or
tales of the kind one finds in Boccaccio's Decameron (c. 1349
51). Nowadays we would classify all the contents of these as
short stories.
Cuddon
Novel /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.
Cuddon
Novel
A form of story or prose narrative containing
characters, action and incident and, perhaps, a
plot
Cuddon
Novel
The form - susceptible to change and
development
Pliable and adaptable to a seemingly endless
variety of topic and themes
A wide range of sub-species or categories.
Cuddon
Novel
The subject matter of the novel eludes classification.
A number of these classifications shade off into each other.
or 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.
Cuddon
Novel
The origins of the genre are obscure
but in the time of the XIIth Dynasty Middle
Kingdom (c. 1200 BC) Egyptians were writing
fiction of a kind which one would describe as a
novel today
Cuddon
Novel
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 love and contain the
rudiments of novels as we understand them today
Cuddon
Novel
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.
Cuddon
Novel
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 1510 and 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 of character they are forerunners of the modern
novel
Cuddon
Novel
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.
Cuddon
Novel
Spain - was ahead of the rest of Europe in the development of
The novel form.
Cervantes's Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615) satirized
chivalry and a number of the earlier novels
In France Rabelais's Gargantua (1534) and Pantagruel (1532)
can be classed as novels of phantasy, or mythopoeic
Cuddon
Novel
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 A Journal of the
Plague Year (1722) – a reconstruction and thus a piece of
historical fiction
Books on 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
Sub-genres
Integrated short stories
Arabian Nights' Entertainments, or The Thousand and One
Nights,
Boccaccio: Decameron
James Joyce: Dubliners
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)
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)
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)
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
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)
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)
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)
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)
Sub-genres
Key novel
actual persons are presented under fictitious names
Aldous Huxley: Point Counter Point (1928) (D. H. Lawrence)
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)
Sub-genres
Utopia
[gr. Ou + topos = no place adn 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
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)
Sub-genres
The saga / chronicle novel
narrative about the life of a large family
John Galsworthy: Forsyte Saga (1906-1921)
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)
Sub-genres
Psychological novel
concerned with emotional, mental lives of the characters
Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway (1925)