Novel
A novel is a fictional narrative that typically explores characters, plot, and themes in depth. It is a longer form of storytelling compared to short stories and novellas, allowing for more complex development of the narrative and characters. Novels can encompass a wide range of genres and styles, making them a versatile and popular form of literary expression.
5 Key excerpts on "Novel"
eBook - ePubResearching Interpretive Talk Around Literary Narrative Texts
Shared Novel Reading
- John Gordon(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In their innovations these writers and many since have drawn our attention to the formulaic nature of conventional narrative forms and their construction. 3.3 Novels in Education The persistent study of Novels in formal education may seem bizarre in an era where the Novel is sometimes considered a dying or ailing form, the form no more than a ‘tissue of signs’ (Barthes, 1977, p. 146). The purported residing importance of the Novel in society is expressed in the assertion that ‘the history of the Novel and the history of the modern subject are, quite literally, one and the same’ (Armstrong, 2005, p. 3) and in the assumption that ‘the Novel participates in all sorts of social processes, helping to found the modern nation, to consolidate overseas empires, to advance industrial capitalism, to enforce sexual difference, and, more generally to produce and police the subject’ (Ortiz-Robles, 2010, p.2). The Novel form may also be considered an expression of situated knowledge. The literariness of literary fiction rests on authors’ ability to realise original, unique worlds and ways of knowing in narratives that somehow resonate for readers. The Novel is an aesthetic device which invites readers to orient to ontologies inherent in narrative voice, concurrently offering distinctive ways of knowing, epistemology by story. The pedagogy of shared Novel reading shapes for student readers a distinctive ontology, situating their dialogic relationships with narratives in the space of the classroom (Wells, 1999). Texts are voiced and heard as well as decoded from the page. Interactive mediation realises the compelling momentum of episodic narratives, fostering students’ emotional development through empathetic response to represented experiences and psychologies of characters and narrators (Harding, 1962; Meek & Watson, 2003; Spencer, 1982, p. 21; Spencer, Warlow, & Barton, 1977, p. 112)...
eBook - ePub- Tonya Krouse, Tamara F. O'Callaghan(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...With this definition in place, practitioners argue that Literature reveals and gives individuals a path toward understanding their humanity. Literature tells stories that connect to people’s day-to-day lives or to the lives of people whose circumstances differ from theirs, while at the same time emphasizing the beauty that language makes possible. Literature reflects the world that individuals inhabit, and it also amplifies and imagines that world in ways that enrich understanding. Often, people are introduced to Literature as a special kind of writing, which uses particular figures of speech and formal techniques to represent reality. Beyond that, advanced literary study shows that Literature can do more than hold a mirror up to people’s personal experience: it can challenge their ideas about what it means to be human and help people to perceive ways of living and thinking that are different from their own. Literature does not just offer something with which an individual can identify. It also allows readers to imagine possibilities beyond their own limited perspectives. The reasons that we should study and interpret Literature connect to a basic belief: Literature provides readers with insight into their own experiences and with alternative possibilities for how to live in the world. With this belief in mind, the study of Literature emphasizes the significance of asking questions, not the end result of arriving at definitive answers or final interpretations. Scholarly methods in the study of Literature provide a rigorous, critical framework for making sense of narratives, stories, rhythms, and sounds of language. Relating to a literary text may inspire our interest or curiosity, but relating is only a beginning: studying Literature means understanding what we read, making sense of it, and connecting it to broader and deeper contemplation about humanity...
eBook - ePubLiterature and Understanding
The Value of a Close Reading of Literary Texts
- Jon Phelan(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Literature, even in the narrowest sense applied to imaginative and creative writing, is a kind of discourse, essentially valued, which affords and invites a distinctive kind of appreciation. (Lamarque 2014: 69) Actually, ‘fiction’ is subject to evaluation on some occasions. Karl May was condemned when his Novels set in the Wild West, and reputedly based on fact, were revealed as fiction. In this instance, the disappointment of many readers extended beyond disappointment at being hoodwinked to dissatisfaction at being left with ‘mere fiction’. In another type of case, fiction may be criticised for containing factual inaccuracy. A Novel set in Cambridge which contains the line ‘I left Magdalene College and walked across the road to the Fitzwilliam Museum’ contains a factual accuracy and one that would disturb a reader familiar with the city. Let us also imagine that this detail served no purpose in the Novel so could not be excused as ‘poetic license’. This type of case results in a kind of imaginative resistance, of a non-moral kind, which leads to a negative evaluation of the work. Here genre convention plays a role in evaluation. If the Novel is realist fiction and if a particular detail is wrong about the subject depicted, then the Novel may be criticised for containing an error. In this second example, the work is criticised for being ‘too fictional’ given the genre conventions of realist fiction. Nevertheless, it is true that describing a work as a work of ‘fiction’ is not usually evaluative but the kind of categorisation publishers use to help readers distinguish what is invented from what is fact; for instance, to differentiate ‘true crime’ from ‘detective fiction’. In contrast, calling a work ‘literature’ is predominantly evaluative and involves some form of aesthetic appreciation. This kind of literary appreciation seems separate from personal preference; I may recognise a late Henry James Novel as literature without the work being to my taste...
- Josephine Guy, Ian Small(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...5 Nineteenth-century literature and history Overview It will be clear, from the argument outlined in Chapter 2, that an important feature of nineteenth-century literature is often assumed to be its qualities of representation, that is, the ways in which literary forms (fiction, poetry and drama) were explicitly used by nineteenth-century writers to engage with a variety of contemporary intellectual, social or political issues. A usual way of framing this engagement of nineteenth-century literature with social life is in terms of the relationship between a literary work and what is loosely called its historical ‘context’. Over the past three to four decades interest in the historical contexts of nineteenth-century literature has tended to draw attention to the political or ideological elements of literary works – to what some critics have called the ‘ideological work’ which they do. That said, there are several ways of defining context, as well as of understanding the relationship between it and a literary work. These differences in their turn have been influenced by a larger philosophical debate about the extent to which all knowledge of the past is relative. Proponents of relativism argue that the way we construct knowledge of the past is, in part, through literary tropes: in this argument the devices which we associate most commonly with literature – such as metaphor or certain kinds of narrative structures or plots – are also to be found in historical writing, particularly in the nineteenth century (White 1973). Moreover, because literary and historical narratives are constructed in similar ways, so the distinction between fiction and history will always run the risk of being blurred...
eBook - ePubDifference, Dialogue, and Development
A Bakhtinian World
- Lakshmi Bandlamudi(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Thus, the study of the Novel, because of its inconclusiveness and openness, occasions the study of development. Keep in mind that while the Novel as a genre is flexible and open, specific Novels are not necessarily so. The Novelistic genre is differentiated, and Bakhtin’s system of classifying Novels based on spatiotemporal configurations gives us a clear picture of Novels characterized by stasis in every realm, the Novels in which we see the growth of the hero against the backdrop of a static world, and the Novels that present the developing hero in the changing world. In short, a close examination of the Novel is a study of modes of consciousness. The Greek Romance: Life Tested by Fate Bakhtin identifies the Greek romance as one of the ancient types of Novels that is built on the specific theme of characters caught in the clutches of events beyond their control. The worldview these Novels present is very clear and straightforward—fate, destiny, gods, and other unknown forces play cruel tricks on individuals, who in turn simply endure —not necessarily transform. In fact, nothing changes; the social structure remains stable and social arrangements are neither altered nor specific to cultural location and historical time. Everything remains static. The characters may even be afflicted with some incurable disease, which they may either endure or perish from (usually these tales have happy endings). Whatever the nature of the adversity that thickens the plot, the emotions of the characters—love between the hero and the heroine, the chastity of the characters, and how they relate to each other—everything remains stable and intact. Fate slaps the subjects with its cruel hands, but their stoicism, chastity, or bravery eventually triumphs over these unpredictable and powerful forces...
