Literary Fiction
Literary fiction refers to a genre of writing that focuses on the quality and depth of the writing, often exploring complex themes and character development. It is known for its emphasis on artistic expression and literary merit, often delving into the human experience and offering thought-provoking insights. This genre is characterized by its nuanced and sophisticated storytelling.
5 Key excerpts on "Literary Fiction"
eBook - ePubLiterature and Understanding
The Value of a Close Reading of Literary Texts
- Jon Phelan(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Literary Fiction, as a sub-genre of literature and of fiction, entails that Literary Fiction stands in a different relation to fiction than genres such as romance or crime. One further implication is that cognitivist, anti-cognitivist and non-cognitivist arguments applied to Literary Fiction need to specify whether the argument applies to Literary Fiction as literature or as fiction, or as both. Notes 1 ‘The library concept of literature’ is defended by (Pettersson 2012: 197) but remains vague over what criteria librarians use: is it book size, popularity, the publisher’s classification? Institutional accounts of fiction and literature are vague in the same way. 2 A similar criticism of the ‘extremely schematic’ illustrations used in moral philosophy is made by Bernard Williams (1995: 217); this criticism applies whether the schematic illustration is fiction or non-fiction. For Williams, the important criterion is that the example is chosen from telling experience. 3 This account of fiction most famously occurs in Currie, G. (1990) The Nature of Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 45; others follow viz. Lamarque, P. and Olsen, E. (1994) Truth, Fiction and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 38–34, located within the conventions of the practice of writing fictions and p. 242; Davies, D. (1996) ‘Fictional Truth and Fictional Authors’. British Journal of Aesthetics, 36, pp. 43–55; Davies, D. (2001) ‘Fiction’. In Gaut, B. and McIver Lopes, D. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. London: Routledge, pp. 263–274; Stock, K. (2011) ‘Fictive Utterance and Imagining’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary, 85, pp. 145–61. 4 Gilbert Ryle (1968, 2009) was the first person to use the phrase ‘thick narrative’ to describe action that signifies more than mere bodily movement e.g. a wink in contrast to a blink...
eBook - ePub- Tonya Krouse, Tamara F. O'Callaghan(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...Further, they are complicated by the other methods that we use to categorize Literature. For example, when we categorize Literature according to its genre, we attend to the formal characteristics of the writing through which the ideas in the text are expressed. Genres of Literature Poetry • A written work that pays great attention to the sounds of language, in the forms of rhyme, meter, and other poetic devices like alliteration, metaphor, simile, and imagery. • Typical poetic forms include the sonnet, lyric poetry, the ode, or free verse. Drama • A script that is meant to be performed for an audience by actors, which includes stage directions and dialogue. Fiction • A prose narrative that tells an imagined story, with an emphasis on exposition, narrative point-of-view, plot, and characterization. • Typical fiction types. include the short story, the novel, and the graphic novel. Creative Nonfiction • A prose narrative that tells a true story, using many of the stylistic techniques of fiction. Cinema • A visual narrative, much like drama, that is meant to be performed and recorded. • An emergent form of cinema, beyond feature-length productions and television series, is video games. When we evaluate Literature by attending to genre, we might find similarities between texts that come from very different historical periods or very different national literary traditions...
eBook - ePubLiterature for Young Adults
Books (and More) for Contemporary Readers
- Joan L. Knickerbocker, James A. Rycik(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Literary nonfiction is sometimes called creative nonfiction, narrative nonfiction, or literature of reality. It has also been labeled the “fourth genre” to elevate it to the status of literature, while distinguishing it from poetry, fiction, and drama (Root & Steinberg, 2010). Literary nonfiction: recognizes both the inherent power of the real and the deep resonance of the literary. It is a form that allows a writer both to narrate facts and to search for truth, blending the empirical eye of the reporter with the moral vision the—I—of the novelist. (University of Oregon, n.d., p. 1) Nonfiction has come to play a much greater role in middle and high school language arts classrooms. Content Learning Standards for English Language Arts (2018) in the state where we live, Ohio (education.ohio.gov), were influenced by the Common Core State Standards for the English Language Arts (National Governors Association, 2010). Beginning with the sixth-grade standards, the term “literary nonfiction” replaces “informational texts” in the category of “reading information.” The result is to reposition nonfiction in the curriculum, giving a much greater emphasis to creative nonfiction than it had in the past. Both literary and informational works of nonfiction may be read outside of school as part of a young adult’s personal reading, but, in the classroom, teachers can acquaint their students with the many genres of nonfiction and guide them to recognize the elements that characterize each genre. The Genres of Nonfiction There is not a universal system for categorizing the genre of a nonfiction work. The following genres were chosen to aid in selection and instruction for works of nonfiction that were either written for young adults or may have a particular appeal to that audience. Biography A biography is the history of a person’s life written by someone else; it can also focus on several persons, which is called a collective biography...
eBook - ePubWhy Reading Books Still Matters
The Power of Literature in Digital Times
- Martha C. Pennington, Robert P. Waxler(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...118). The reader of a story gains this same access to the story characters’ mental experience. By portraying the “mundane imaginative structures of memory, immediate perception, planning, calculation, and decision-making, both as we experience them ourselves and as we understand others to be experiencing them” (Dutton, 2009, p. 119), literary narrative pulls the reader into the reading experience and so into the story itself. The Nature of Fiction Fiction is a category of linguistic genre, typically written, whose purpose is to move people into their imaginations and then to take them on an enjoyable – and, in the best case, enriching – psychological journey in that imaginary space created through language. A fiction writer succeeds in doing this by presenting a simulation of human life and experience in the form of a story that stimulates a reader’s imagination and guides the reader’s psychological journey. An effective simulation in a work of fiction takes readers on a mental journey that is both enjoyable and memorable as it traverses a “storyscape” which, while it has familiar resonances, offers much that is new and beckons to be explored. This is a journey leading from the beginning point of the story to its ending point via the new terrain created from the writer’s mind and experience, as linked to the vast territory of the reader’s own mind and experience. Fiction builds a model world within the text that has resemblances to the nontextual “real world,” that is, it has verisimilitude. In the view of Uffe Seilman and Steen Larsen, “verisimilitude seems to be a decisive feature of ‘good’ literature” (Seilman & Larsen, 1989, p. 166) that gives it “personal resonance” (p. 167) for the reader and helps distinguish literary reading from “ordinary text comprehension” (p. 166). James Wood, writing in How Fiction Works (Wood, 2008), stresses that verisimilitude is only one of two essential qualities of fiction – the other being artifice...
eBook - ePubMetafiction
The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction
- Patricia Waugh(Author)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...As in all Literary Fiction, the author projects, through quasi-judgemental statements, the ‘states of affairs’ which form the imaginary world. If the work were a ‘real’ historical or documentary account, the reader would match these with determinate individual states of affairs existing historically. However, in realism, the reader matches them with a general type, based on the particulars of a given historical time but not coincidental with them. Because of the similarity in the processes of constructing historical texts and realistic fictional texts, the practice is open to abuse. It could be argued that in realism one of these potential abuses is the appropriation and reduction of historical particularity for the support of assumptions about a timeless ‘human nature’ or a ‘ Plus ça change. . . ’ philosophy. There is a sub-category of metafictional novels which are particularly effective in foregrounding such abuses. In the midst of their overtly fictional or ‘alternative’ worlds, these novels do present the reader with ‘perfect matches’. They offer not ‘general matches’ (as realism) but historically determinate particulars. Such novels suggest that history itself is a multiplicity of ‘alternative worlds’, as fictional as, but other than, the worlds of novels. They suggest this by inserting real historical events or personages into an overtly fictional context. Discussing the development of narrative, Scholes and Kellogg have argued that the novel emerged as a resynthesis on the one hand of the ‘empirical’ components of epic (history/mimesis) and on the other hand of its ‘fictional’ components (romance/fable). They go on to argue that the novel is at present breaking down into its original components but reverting to the purely ‘fictional’ (Scholes and Kellogg 1966). David Lodge has suggested that ‘it would be equally possible to move in the opposite direction – towards empirical narrative and away from fiction’ (Lodge, 1977b, p. 90)...
