10 Literary Narrative Fiction

Genres of Narrative Fiction; History of the Form

Dickens Bicentenary

Teachers’ resources:http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/dickensLiterary events:http://literature.britishcouncil.org/projects/2011/dickens-2012Student website for info:http://dublin.studenty.me/2012/02/07/what-

the-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.eventbrite.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 Fantasy

Realism vs romance: a matter of perception vs a matter of vision

2 principal ways fiction can be related to life

Realism Romance

Literary narrative fiction

literature: art of languagekinds 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 tothe 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

+ + + Lit. narr. fict.

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- - - 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)

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 rulesin contemporary practice a novel is between 60-70.000 words and, say, 200.000.

Cuddon Novel

The actual term 'novel' has had a variety of meanings andimplications at different stages.

From roughly the 15th to the 18th c. its meaning tended toderive from the Italian novella and the Spanish novela (theFrench term nouvelle, is closely related)

The term (often used in a plural sense) denoted short stories ortales of the kind one finds in Boccaccio's Decameron (c. 134951). Nowadays we would classify all the contents of these asshort stories.

CuddonNovel /novelty

The term denoted a prose narrative about characters and theiractions in what was recognizably everyday life and usually in thepresent, 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.

CuddonNovel

A form of story or prose narrative containingcharacters, action and incident and, perhaps, aplot

CuddonNovel

The form - susceptible to change anddevelopment

Pliable and adaptable to a seemingly endless variety of topic and themes

A wide range of sub-species or categories.

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 embracesmany books; proletarian, propaganda and thesis novels tend tohave much in common; the picaresque narrative is often a novelof adventure; a saga novel may also be a regional novel.

CuddonNovel

The origins of the genre are obscure

but in the time of the XIIth Dynasty MiddleKingdom (c. 1200 BC) Egyptians were writingfiction of a kind which one would describe as anovel today

CuddonNovel

From Classical times

Daphnis and Chloe (2nd c. BC) by LongusThe Golden Ass (2nd c. AD) by ApuleiusSatyricon (1st c. AD) of Petronius Arbiter

Most of these are concerned with love and contain therudiments of novels as we understand them today

CuddonNovel

Oriental prose fiction

Arabian Nights‘ Entertainments, or The Thousand and OneNights, 10th c. the collection, collected and established as a group of stories probably by an Egyptian professional story-tellerat some time between the 14th and 16th c.

Became known in Europe early in the 18th c., since when theyhave had a considerable influence.

CuddonNovel

Collections of novella or short talesItaly -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 werein proseIn their method of narration and in their creation anddevelopment of character they are forerunners of the modernnovel

CuddonNovel

Until the 14th c. most of the literature of entertainment (and thenovel is usually intended as an entertainment) was confined tonarrative verse, particularly the epic and the romance.

Romance eventually yielded the word roman, which is the termfor novel in most European languages.

In some ways the novel is a descendant of the medievalromances, which, in the first place, like the epic, were written inverse and then in prose (e.g. Malory's Morte D'Arthur, 1485).

Verse narratives had been supplanted by prose narratives by theend of the 17th c.

CuddonNovel

Spain - was ahead of the rest of Europe in the development ofThe novel form. Cervantes's Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615) satirizedchivalry 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

CuddonNovel

England, end of the 15th c., extended prose narrative:John Lyly's Euphues (in two parts, 1578 and 1580Sir Philip Sidney's pastoral romance Arcadia (1590).

1719 – Daniel Defoe published his story of adventure RobinsonCrusoe, one in a long tradition of desert island fiction

Defoe's other two main contributions to the novel form wereMoll Flanders (1722), a sociological novel, and A Journal of thePlague Year (1722) – a reconstruction and thus a piece ofhistorical 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 storiesArabian Nights' Entertainments, or The Thousand and One Nights, Boccaccio: DecameronJames Joyce: Dubliners

Sub-genresRomance

any sort of stroy of chivalry or of loveCervantes: Don Quixote (1605-1615)Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (14th c.)Thomas Malory: Le Morte D’Arthur (15th c.)

Pastoral romanceLongus: 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 noveltells the life of a knave or a picaroon who is the servant of severel mastersDaniel Defoe: Moll Flanders (1722)Henry Fielding: Jonathan Wild (1743)

Sub-genresNovel of adventure / desert island novel

related to te picaresque novel and the romanceDaniel 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-genresGothic 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 storyHorace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764Ann 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-genresEpistolary 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 sentimentalitypopular in the 18th c., distresses of the virtuous Samuel Richardson: Pamela (1740)Oliver Goldsmith: The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)

Sentimentality in fictionLaurence Sterne: A Sentimental Journey (1768)

Sub-genresHistorical novel

a form of fictional narrative which reconstructs history imaginativelyWalter Scott: Waverly (1814)William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair (1847-48)Robert Graves: I, Claudius (1934)William Golding: Rites of Passage (1980)

Sub-genres

Documentary novelbased 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 novelactual persons are presented under fictitious namesAldous Huxley: Point Counter Point (1928) (D. H. Lawrence)

Sub-genres

thesis / sociological / propaganda noveltreats of a social, political, religious problemHarriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

the condition of England novel /regional novelCharles 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, dystopiaScience fictionPhantasy or fantasy

Sub-genresCampus novel

has a university campus as settingMary McCarthy: The Groves of Academe (1952)Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim (1954)David Lodge: Changing Places (1975)

Sub-genres

The saga / chronicle novelnarrative about the life of a large familyJohn Galsworthy: Forsyte Saga (1906-1921)

Sub-genres

Time novelemploys stream of consciousness technique, time is used as a themeJames Joyce: Ulysses (1922)Marcel Proust: A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927)

Sub-genres

Psychological novelconcerned with emotional, mental lives of the charactersVirginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway (1925)