The Fiction of Narrative
The Fiction of Narrative

Author: Hayden White

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2010-06

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 0801894808

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For students and scholars of historiography, the theory of history, and literary studies, Robert Doran (French and comparative literature, U. of Rochester) gathers together 23 previously uncollected essays written by theorist and historian Hayden White (comparative literature, Stanford U.) from 1957 to 2007, on his theories of historical writing and narrative. Essays are organized chronologically and reveal the evolution of White's thought and its relationship to theories of the time, as well as the impact on the way scholars think about historical representation, the discipline of history, and how historiography intersects with other areas, especially literary studies. They specifically address theory of tropes, theory of narrative, and figuralism.

Prose Fiction: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Narrative
Prose Fiction: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Narrative

Author: Ignasi Ribó

Publisher: Open Book Publishers

Published: 2019-12-13

Total Pages: 119

ISBN-13: 1783748125

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This concise and highly accessible textbook outlines the principles and techniques of storytelling. It is intended as a high-school and college-level introduction to the central concepts of narrative theory – concepts that will aid students in developing their competence not only in analysing and interpreting short stories and novels, but also in writing them. This textbook prioritises clarity over intricacy of theory, equipping its readers with the necessary tools to embark on further study of literature, literary theory and creative writing. Building on a ‘semiotic model of narrative,’ it is structured around the key elements of narratological theory, with chapters on plot, setting, characterisation, and narration, as well as on language and theme – elements which are underrepresented in existing textbooks on narrative theory. The chapter on language constitutes essential reading for those students unfamiliar with rhetoric, while the chapter on theme draws together significant perspectives from contemporary critical theory (including feminism and postcolonialism). This textbook is engaging and easily navigable, with key concepts highlighted and clearly explained, both in the text and in a full glossary located at the end of the book. Throughout the textbook the reader is aided by diagrams, images, quotes from prominent theorists, and instructive examples from classical and popular short stories and novels (such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis,’ J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, or Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, amongst many others). Prose Fiction: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Narrative can either be incorporated as the main textbook into a wider syllabus on narrative theory and creative writing, or it can be used as a supplementary reference book for readers interested in narrative fiction. The textbook is a must-read for beginning students of narratology, especially those with no or limited prior experience in this area. It is of especial relevance to English and Humanities major students in Asia, for whom it was conceived and written.

Fiction and Narrative
Fiction and Narrative

Author: Derek Matravers

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2014-04

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0199647011

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Do fictions depend upon imagination? Derek Matravers argues against the mainstream view that they do, and offers an original account of what it is to read, listen to, or watch a narrative. He downgrades the divide between fiction and non-fiction, largely dispenses with the imagination, and in doing so illuminates a succession of related issues.

The Rogue Narrative and Irish Fiction, 1660-1790
The Rogue Narrative and Irish Fiction, 1660-1790

Author: Joe Lines

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2021-09-20

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 0815655193

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With characteristic lawlessness and connection to the common man, the figure of the rogue commanded the world of Irish fiction from 1660 to 1790. During this period of development for the Irish novel, this archetypal figure appears over and over again. Early Irish fiction combined the picaresque genre, focusing on a cunning, witty trickster or pícaro, with the escapades of real and notorious criminals. On the one hand, such rogue tales exemplified the English stereotypes of an unruly Ireland, but on the other, they also personified Irish patriotism. Existing between the dual publishing spheres of London and Dublin, the rogue narrative explored the complexities of Anglo-Irish relations. In this volume, Lines investigates why writers during the long eighteenth-century so often turned to the rogue narrative to discuss Ireland. Alongside recognized works of Irish fiction, such as those by William Chaigneau, Richard Head, and Charles Johnston, Lines presents lesser-known and even anonymous popular texts. With consideration for themes of conflict, migration, religion, and gender, Lines offers up a compelling connection between the rogues themselves, marked by persistence and adaptability, and the ever-popular rogue narrative in this early period of Irish writing.

Narrative Fiction
Narrative Fiction

Author: Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2003-12-16

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1134464975

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What is a narrative? What is narrative fiction? How does it differ from other kinds of narrative? What featuers turn a discourse into a narrative text? Now widely acknowledged as one of the most significant volumes in its field, Narrative Fiction turns its attention to these and other questions. In contrast to many other studies, Narrative Fiction is organized arround issues - such as events, time, focalization, characterization, narration, the text and its reading - rather than individual theorists or approaches. Within this structure, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan addresses key approaches to narrative fiction, including New Criticism, formalism, structuralism and phenomenology, but also offers views of the modifications to these theroies. While presenting an analysis of the system governing all fictional narratives, whether in the form of novel, short story or narrative poem, she also suggests how individual narratives can be studied against the background of this general system. A broad range of literary examples illustrate key aspects of the study. This edition is brought fully up-to-date with an invaluable new chapter, reflecting on recent developments in narratology. Readers are also directed to key recent works in the field. These additions to a classic text ensure that Narrative Fiction will remain the ideal starting point for anyone new to narrative theory.

Narrative as Theme
Narrative as Theme

Author: Gerald Prince

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 1992-01-01

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 9780803236998

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In literature the very act of narration often constitutes a theme: everyone is familiar with narration that interrupts the story, that provides an ironic gloss on the action, that exposes the narrator, that serves to deceive. In Narrative as Theme Gerald Prince offers the first book-length study of the theme of narrative and of the relationshipøbetween narrative and truth in fiction. In the first part, theoretical in nature, Prince considers the notion of theme as well as the theme of narrative itself, surveys the research that has come out of that notion, and isolates starting points for the investigation of narrative as theme. Of particular interest to narratologists will be his discussion of the "disnarrated," all those passages of a text that consider what did not or does not happen but oculd have. He shows how the disnarrated is an important guide to reading the theme of narrative. The second part focuses on seven French novels: Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cl_ves, Voltaire's Candide, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Sartre's La Nausäe, Maupassant's Bel-Ami, Claude Simon's La Route des Flandres, and Patrick Modiano's Rue des Boutiques Obscures. Written in first and third person, absorbed or not in the act of narration, variously concerned with history, ethics, and psychology, these classical, modern, and postmodern works exemplify basic positions with regard to the truth or value of narrative. His Dictionary of Narratology, published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1987, confirmed Gerald Prince as one of the world's leading narratologists.

The Pace of Fiction
The Pace of Fiction

Author: Brian Gingrich

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-07-15

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0191899143

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The Pace of Fiction redefines the literary history of the novel by analyzing its most elaborate feature: its pace. It moves from the rise of the novel to realism and modernism. It starts by tracing the evolution of two narrative units: scenes ("shown" slowly) and summaries ("told" swiftly). These units emerge from the conflict of epic and drama, gain shape in the commentaries of Fielding and Goethe, and become dynamically opposed in nineteenth-century realism. In Middlemarch, they rotate in regular sequence: summaries move swiftly until scenes slow them down; scenes play out dramatically until summaries sweep them forward; their movement imitates the conflict of fate and free will. Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, scenic impulses overtake summary storytelling. The reader sees the tendency already in Austen's dialogues, Hawthorne's tableaux, or Balzac's battering drama, and finds it in Jane Eyre's placement of summaries in private scenes. When Flaubert extends scenic vividness to all of his summaries, and when Henry James subordinates his summaries to scenic consciousness, the extreme pressure of scene upon summary brings the opposition of realist pacing to collapse. But other oppositions arise in the modernisms that follow. In the alternation of stasis and kinesis, of drifting thoughts and everyday actions, of stories and acts of storytelling—in Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Mann, Hemingway—pace gathers and creates meaning in new ways.

Telling Stories
Telling Stories

Author: Steven Cohan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-08

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 1136494243

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First Published in 2002. We are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. Modes and categories inherited from the past no longer seem to fit the reality experienced by a new generation. New Accents is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change; to stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study. This book introduces a theoretical framework for studying narrative fiction. A narrative recounts a story, a series of events in a temporal sequence.

We-narratives
We-narratives

Author: Natalya Bekhta

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780814214411

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Provides a comprehensive account of the structural and linguistic distinctiveness of stories told in the first-person plural, describing its features and rhetorical effects.

Story and Discourse
Story and Discourse

Author: Seymour Chatman

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2019-06-30

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1501741616

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"For the specialist in the study of narrative structure, this is a solid and very perceptive exploration of the issues salient to the telling of a story—whatever the medium. Chatman, whose approach here is at once dualist and structuralist, divides his subject into the 'what' of the narrative (Story) and the 'way' (Discourse)... Chatman's command of his material is impressive."—Library Journal