Essentials of the Theory of Fiction

Michael J. Hoffman, Patrick D. Murphy, Michael J. Hoffman, Patrick D. Murphy

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780822386599
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

What accounts for the power of stories to both entertain and illuminate? This question has long compelled the attention of storytellers and students of literature alike, and over the past several decades it has opened up broader dialogues about the nature of culture and interpretation. This third edition of the bestselling Essentials of the Theory of Fiction provides a comprehensive view of the theory of fiction from the nineteenth century through modernism and postmodernism to the present. It offers a sample of major theories of fictional technique while emphasizing recent developments in literary criticism. The essays cover a variety of topics, including voice, point of view, narration, sequencing, gender, and race. Ten new selections address issues such as oral memory in African American fiction, temporality, queer theory, magical realism, interactive narratives, and the effect of virtual technologies on literature. For students and generalists alike, Essentials of the Theory of Fiction is an invaluable resource for understanding how fiction works.

Contributors. M. M. Bakhtin, John Barth, Roland Barthes, Wayne Booth, John Brenkman, Peter Brooks, Catherine Burgass, Seymour Chatman, J. Yellowlees Douglas, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Wendy B. Faris, Barbara Foley, E. M. Forster, Joseph Frank, Joanne S. Frye, William H. Gass, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Gérard Genette, Ursula K. Heise, Michael J. Hoffman, Linda Hutcheon, Henry James, Susan S. Lanser, Helen Lock, Georg Lukács, Patrick D. Murphy, Ruth Ronen, Joseph Tabbi, Jon Thiem, Tzvetan Todorov, Virginia Woolf

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface to the Third Edition
• Introduction
• The Art of Fiction
• Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown
• Flat and Round Characters
• Epic and Novel
• Spatial Form in Modern Literature
• Writing and the Novel
• Distance and Point of View: An Essay in Classification
• Marxist Aesthetics and Literary Realism
• The Concept of Character in Fiction
• Time and Narrative in "A la recherche du temps perdu"
• Discourse: Nonnarrated Stories
• Reading as Construction
• The Literature of Replenishment
• The Blackness of Blackness:A Critique on the Sign and the Signifying Monkey
• Reading for the Plot
• Breaking the Sentence;Breaking the Sequence
• The Documentary Novel and the Problem of Borders
• Politics, Literary Form, and a Feminist Poetics of the Novel
• ‘‘The Pastime of Past Time’’: Fiction, History, Historiographical Metafiction
• ‘‘Building Up from Fragments’’: The Oral Memory Process in Some Recent African-American Written Narratives
• Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction
• The Textualization of the Reader in Magical Realist Fiction
• Are Fictional Worlds Possible?
• Chronoschisms
• Queering Narratology
• A Brief Story of Postmodern Plot
• On Voice
• What Interactive Narratives Do That Print Narratives Cannot
• A Media Migration: Toward a PotentialLiterature
• Biographical Notes
• Permissions
• Index