10 Literary Narrative Fiction

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10 Literary Narrative Fiction

• Genres of Narrative Fiction
• History of the Form

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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/what-the-dick
  ens-is-dickens-2012/

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Dickens Bicentenary Continued

• Celebration on 19 December
• a live-streamed audience with Lucinda dickens
  Hawksley, Great-Great-Great-Granddaughter of
  Charles Dickens
• http//audiencewithlucindadickenshawksley.eventbri
  te.com/

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Narratives

• Personal, political, historical, legal,
  medical narratives narratives 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

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The spectrum of fiction

• fact fiction truth?
• History Realism Romance Fantasy
• Realism vs romance a matter of perception
• vs a matter of vision
• 2 principal ways fiction can be related to life

Realism Romance
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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

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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

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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

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Literary, narrative, fictional
examples literary narrative fictional
Lit. narr. fict.
-
-
- -
-
- -
- -
- - - Nonlit. nonnarr. nonfiction

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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CuddonNovel

• A form of story or prose narrative containing
• characters, action and incident and, perhaps, a
• plot

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CuddonNovel

• 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.

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CuddonNovel

• 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.

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CuddonNovel

• 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

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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 love and contain
  the
• rudiments of novels as we understand them today

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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.

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CuddonNovel

• Collections of novella or short tales
• Italy -
• Giovanni Boccaccios Decameron (134952, revised
  13701371)
• had much influence on Geoffrey Chaucers The
  Canterbury Tales (late 14th c.)
• Matteo Bandellos 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

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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.

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CuddonNovel

• 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

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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 A
  Journal of the
• Plague Year (1722) a reconstruction and thus a
  piece of
• historical fiction

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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

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Sub-genres

• Integrated short stories
• Arabian Nights' Entertainments, or The Thousand
  and One Nights,
• Boccaccio Decameron
• James Joyce Dubliners

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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 DArthur (15th c.)
• Pastoral romance
• Longus Daphnis and Chloe (2nd c. A.D.)
• Philip Sidney Arcadia (1590)
• Anti-pastoral
• Thomas Hardy Tess of the dUrbevilles (1891),
  Jude the Obscure (1895)

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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)

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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)

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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

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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Sub-genres

• Key novel
• actual persons are presented under fictitious
  names
• Aldous Huxley Point Counter Point (1928) (D. H.
  Lawrence)

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Sub-genres

• thesis / sociological / propaganda novel
• treats of a social, political, religious problem
• Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Toms Cabin (1852)
• the condition of England novel /regional novel
• Charles Dickens Hard Times (1854)
• Charlotte Brontë Shirley (1849)

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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 Gullivers Travels (1726, 1735)
• William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954)
• Anti-utopia, dystopia
• Science fiction
• Phantasy or fantasy

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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)

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Sub-genres

• The saga / chronicle novel
• narrative about the life of a large family
• John Galsworthy Forsyte Saga (1906-1921)

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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)

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Sub-genres

• Psychological novel
• concerned with emotional, mental lives of the
  characters
• Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway (1925)