Fiction: Epic to Novel

• Literary theory has long been concerned with classifying literary works into genres, resulting in diverse and sometimes contradictory categories
• The triad of epic, drama, and poetry is a common classification in modern literary criticism
• Recent classifications often use fiction, drama, and poetry to designate the three major literary genres
• Film is considered a fourth textual manifestation

Fiction: From Epic to Novel

• The novel emerged as the most important form of prose fiction in the 18th century
• Precursors include Homer’s epics (Iliad, Odyssey) and Virgil’s Aeneid
• These influenced medieval epics like Dante’s Divine Comedy and early modern English epics such as Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Milton’s Paradise Lost
• Traditional epics revolve around a hero fulfilling tasks of national or cosmic significance
• Classical epics reflect self-contained world-views rooted in myth, history, and religion
• The epic weakened with the obliteration of a unified world-view and was replaced by the novel
• The novel represents relativism
• Traditional epics are distinguished from other poetry by length, narrative structure, character depiction, and plot patterns
• They are considered precursors to the modern novel

The Rise of the Romance

• The romance established itself as an independent genre in classical times and more strongly in the late Middle Ages
• Ancient romances like Apuleius’ Golden Ass were in prose
• Medieval works like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight used verse forms
• The romance is considered a forerunner of the novel because of its focused plot and unified point of view
• The romance condenses action and orients the plot toward a particular goal
• The protagonist is depicted in more detail, moving beyond the abstract heroic ideals of the classical epic
• Individual traits come to the foreground
• Crucial features that distinguish the romance from epic poetry include:
  • Individualization of the protagonist
  • Deliberately perspectival point of view
  • Linear plot structure oriented toward a specific climax no longer centered on national or cosmic problems

The Emergence of the Novel

• The novel emerged in Spain in the 17th century and in England in the 18th century
• Early novels remain rooted in the epic
• Cervantes’ Don Quixote parodies traditional elements of the epic and chivalric romance
• Cervantes initiates a new and modified epic tradition
• Fielding's Joseph Andrews is characterized as a "comic romance" and "comic epic poem in prose"
• Plot structure of the early novel is often episodic
• Elements of the epic survive in a new form
• Works by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne mark the beginning of this new literary genre
• The novel replaces the epic, becoming one of the most productive genres of modern literature

Key Characteristics of the Novel

• The novel is characterized by "realism" and "individualism"
• The modern novel grounds the plot in a distinct historical and geographical reality
• The allegorical and typified epic hero transforms into the protagonist of the novel, with individual and realistic character traits
• These features reflect sociohistorical tendencies of the 18th century
• The novel mirrors the modern disregard for the collective spirit of the Middle Ages
• Factors underlying shifts in 18th-century literary production:
  • Rise of an educated middle class
  • Spread of the printing press
  • Modified economic basis that allowed authors to pursue writing as an independent profession

Novel Subgenres

• Picaresque novel: relates the experiences of a vagrant rogue in conflict with society's norms in a satirical way:
  • Grimmelshausen’s Simplizissimus
  • Defoe’s Moll Flanders
  • Fielding’s Tom Jones
• Bildungsroman (novel of education): describes the development of a protagonist from childhood to maturity
  • Eliot’s Mill on the Floss
  • Lessing’s Children of Violence cycle
• Epistolary novel: uses letters as a means of first-person narration
  • Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa
• Historical novel: actions take place within a realistic historical context
  • Scott’s Waverley
• New journalism: uses the novel to rework incidents based on real events
  • Capote’s In Cold Blood
  • Mailer’s Armies of the Night
• Satirical novel: highlights weaknesses of society through the exaggeration of social conventions
  • Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
  • Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Utopian novels or science fiction novels: create alternative worlds to criticize sociopolitical conditions
  • Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
  • Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
• Gothic novel
  • Stoker’s Dracula
• Detective novel
  • Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express

The Short Story

• The short story is a concise form of prose fiction that has received less attention than the novel
• Roots lie in antiquity and the Middle Ages
• Story, myth, and fairy tale are related to the oldest types of textual manifestations
• These were primarily orally transmitted
• "Tale," like the German "Sage," reflects the oral dimension inherent in short fiction
• The Bible includes stories such as "Job" and "The Prodigal Son"
• These stories' structures and narrative patterns resemble modern short stories
• Ancient satire and the romance are also forerunners
• Medieval and early modern narrative cycles are indirect precursors
  • Arabian Thousand and One Nights
  • Boccaccio’s Decamerone
  • Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
• These cycles feature a frame narrative which unites otherwise heterogeneous stories
• The short story emerged as an independent text type at the end of the 18th century, parallel to the development of the novel and the newspaper
• Magazines of the 19th century exerted a major influence on the establishment of the short story
• Magazines provided an ideal medium for publication
• Forerunners of these journals are the Tatler and the Spectator
• Magazines like the New Yorker still function as privileged organs for first publications of short stories
• Many early novels appeared as serial stories in magazines before being published as independent books
  • Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers

Short Story Characteristics

• The short story has never achieved the status of the novel
• The short story surfaces in comparative definitions of other prose genres such as the novella and novelette
• A crucial feature is its impression of unity
• It can be read without interruption
• The plot of the short story is highly selective, focusing on one central moment of action
• Suspense build-up is accelerated
• Action often commences close to the climax (in medias res) reconstructing context through flashbacks
• Focuses on one main figure or location
• Setting and characters receive less detailed depiction than in the novel
• For the simple reason of limited length, the short story, has to be more suggestive
• Chooses one particular point of view
• The novella or novelette holds an intermediary position between novel and short story
  • Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
• Attempts to explain the nature of these genres rely on different methodological approaches:
  • Reception theory
  • Formalist notions
  • Contextual approaches
• Plot, time, character, setting, narrative perspective, and style emerge in definitions
• These notions function the most important areas of inquiry in film and drama
• Aspects can be isolated most easily in prose fiction

Key Elements of Prose Fiction

• Plot: What happens?
• Characters: Who acts?
• Narrative perspective: Who sees what?
• Setting: Where and when do the events take place?

Plot

• Plot is the logical interaction of thematic elements that leads to a change of the original situation
• Traditional plot line: exposition—complication—climax—resolution
• Exposition: presentation of initial situation
• Complication: conflict that produces suspense and leads to a climax
• Climax: crisis or turning point
• Resolution: denouement
• Most traditional fiction, drama, and film employ this linear plot structure
• Flashback and foreshadowing introduce information concerning the past or future
• The opening scene in Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard is an example of foreshadowing in film
• Drama of the absurd and the experimental novel break with linear narrative
• Contemporary novels alter linear narrative by introducing elements of plot in an unorthodox sequence
• Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five mixes levels of action and time, such as experiences of a young soldier in WWII, his life in America after the war, and a science-fiction-like dream-world
• Different levels are juxtaposed as fragments by rendering the different settings as well as their internal sequences of action in a non-chronological way
• Vonnegut's protagonist reports on the unconventional literary practice of extraterrestrial people on the planet Tralfamadore
• The different levels of action and time converge in the mind of the protagonist as seemingly simultaneous presences
• Vonnegut’s technique of non-linear narrative conveys the schizophrenic mind of the protagonist through parallel presentations of different frames of experiences
• Slaughterhouse-Five borrows techniques from the visual arts
• Literature is a temporal art
• Visual arts are a spatial art
• Fragmented narratives which abandon linear plots surface in various genres and media

Characters

• Formalist approaches focus on plot and narrative structure
• Psychoanalysis shifts attention to the text’s characters
• Characters can be rendered as types or as individuals
• Typified character: dominated by one specific trait; flat character
• Round character: persona with more complex and differentiated features
• Typified characters often represent general traits of a group of persons or abstract ideas
• Medieval allegorical depictions preferred typification to personify vices, virtues, or philosophical and religious positions
• Everyman-figure is a major example of this general pattern
• Typified character presentations re-emerge in magazines, posters, film, and TV
• The opening scene of Twain’s “A True Story” uses typified character presentation
• Twain juxtaposes African Americans and whites, slaves and slave-owners, female and male
• Twain delineates a formal relationship betweeen two character types
• Twain highlights patterns of oppression in their most extreme forms
• Analyses of African American and feminist literary theory focus on mechanisms of race, class, and gender as analogously functioning dimensions
• Individualization of a character is a main feature of the novel
• Many modern fictional texts reflect a tension between these modes of representation
• Melville’s novel Moby Dick combines allegorical and individualistic elements
• Both typified and individualized characters can be rendered through showing and telling
• Explanatory characterization, or telling, describes a person through a narrator
  • Example: depiction of Mr Rochester in Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre
• Dramatic characterization, or showing, does away with the position of an obvious narrator
• This method of presentation creates the impression that the reader can perceive the acting figures without any intervening agency
• The image of a person is "shown" solely through actions and utterances without interfering commentary
• This provides an "objective" effect
• Hemingway’s texts are famous for this technique
• Dramatic presentation pretends to represent objectively while remaining biased and perspectival
• One can distinguish between two basic kinds of characters (round or flat)
• Two general modes of presentation (showing or telling): Kinds of characters
  • typified character
  • individualized character
  • flat
  • round Modes of presentation
  • explanatory method
  • dramatic method
  • narration
  • dialogue—monologue
• Explanatory and dramatic methods hardly ever appear in their pure forms
• Questions concerning character presentation are always connected with problems of narrative perspective

Point of View

• Narrative perspective characterizes how a text presents persons, events, and settings
• Subtleties of narrative perspectives developed parallel to the emergence of the novel, and can be reduced to three basic positions:
  • Action is mediated through an exterior, unspecified narrator (omniscient point of view)
  • Action is mediated through a person involved in the action (first-person narration)
  • Action is presented without additional commentary (figural narrative situation)
• Structures are usually hybrids combining elements of various types of narrative situations
  • omniscient point of view
    • through external narrator who refers to protagonist in the third person
  • figural narrative situation
    • through figures acting in the text
  • first-person narration
    • by protagonist or by minor character
• Texts with an omniscient point of view refer to the acting figures in the third person
• The action is presented from an all-knowing, God-like perspective
• Allows for changes in setting, time, and action, while simultaneously providing various items of information, beyond the range and knowledge of the acting figures
• Austen introduces an omniscient narrator in her novel Northanger Abbey
• Omniscient narrator can go back in time, look into the future, and possess exact information about different figures of the novel
• Omniscient point of view was particularly popular in the traditional epic
• First-person narration renders the action as seen through a participating figure, who refers to her- or himself in the first person
• First-person narrations can adopt the point of view of either the protagonist or a minor figure
• The majority of novels in first-person narration use the protagonist as narrator
  • Sterne’s Tristram Shandy
  • Dickens’ David Copperfield
  • Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye
• First-person narrations by protagonists aim at a supposedly authentic representation of the subjective experiences and feelings of the narrator
• Proximity to the protagonist can be avoided by introducing a minor character as first-person narrator
• By depicting events as seen through the eyes of another person, the character of the protagonist remains less transparent
  • Melville’s Moby Dick
  • Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
• The opening words of Moby Dick, “Call me Ishmael,” are uttered by the minor character Ishmael, who describes Captain Ahab
• In The Great Gatsby, Nick relates the events around Gatsby from the periphery of the action
• Through this deliberately chosen narrative perspective, the author anticipates thematic aspects of the evolving plot
• In the figural narrative situation, the narrator moves into the background
• This suggests that the plot is revealed solely through the actions of the characters in the text
• Encourages the reader to judge the action without an intervening commentator
  • Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man renders the action through the figural perspective of the protagonist
• Direct speech and mental reflections are employed to reveal action through the perspective of the protagonist
• This form of third-person narrative is bound to the perspective of a figure who is also part of the action
• Shift from exterior aspects of the plot to the inner world of a character known as stream-of-consciousness technique
• Related narratological phenomena:
  • Interior monologue
  • Free indirect discourse
• The narrator disappears, leaving the thoughts and psychic reactions of a participating figure as the sole mediators of the action
• These techniques found their way into modernist prose fiction after World War I
• Reflects a shift in cultural paradigms during the first decades of the 20th century
• Literature shifted its main focus from the sociologically descriptive goals of the 19th century to psychic phenomena of the individual
  • Joyce's Ulysses strings together mental associations of the character Molly Bloom
  • Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury renders impressions and events through the inner perspective of a mentally handicapped character
• These experimental narrative techniques of character presentation became the major structural features of modernism
  • Woolf's Mrs Dalloway presents events through the thoughts of a number of other figures
• Characters cross paths with Clarissa Dalloway
• Different perspectives or thoughts of the characters occur simultaneously
• Integrates formal elements of cubism into literary practice
• Simultaneous projection of different perspectives is a central concern of cubist art
• Levels of fiction tend to receive full meaning through their interaction
• Analyses of literary texts should show to what ends structural elements are employed
• Structural analysis of these levels in literary texts should not stop at the mere description of these features

Setting

• Setting is the location, historical period, and social surroundings in which the action of a text develops
  • Ulysses: Setting is Dublin, 16 June 1904
  • Hamlet: Action takes place in medieval Denmark
• Authors embed a story in a context of time and place to support action, characters, and narrative perspective
• In the gothic novel and certain other forms of prose fiction, setting is one of the crucial elements of the genre as such
  • The setting of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” indirectly resembles Roderick Usher
• The modernist novel Mrs Dalloway relies heavily on setting to unite the fragmentary narrative perspectives into a single framework
• Different perspectives or thoughts of the characters occur simultaneously
• The action is situated in the city of London
• Virginia Woolf borrows from the visual arts
• Attempts to integrate formal elements of cubism into literary practice
• Setting gives full meaning when united in its interaction with other levels such as plot point of view, and character