Essentials Of The Theory Of Fiction

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

• ISBN13: 9780822335092
• ISBN10: 0822335093
• Edition: 3rd
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-06-22
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

What accounts for the power of stories to both entertain us and interpret our world? This question has compelled the attention of storytellers and students of literature alike--particularly in recent decades--and their answers have opened an important window on larger questions about the nature of culture, as well as of interpretation and understanding. This second edition of 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.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Third Edition	vii
Introduction	1	(12)
The Art of Fiction	13	(8)
Henry James
Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown	21	(14)
Virginia Woolf
Flat and Round Characters	35	(8)
E. M. Forster
Epic and Novel	43	(18)
M. M. Bakhtin
Spatial Form in Modern Literature	61	(14)
Joseph Frank
Writing and the Novel	75	(8)
Roland Barthes
Distance and Point of View: An Essay in Classification	83	(18)
Wayne Booth
Marxist Aesthetics and Literary Realism	101	(12)
Georg Lukacs
The Concept of Character in Fiction	113	(8)
William H. Gass
Time and Narrative in A la recherche du temps perdu	121	(18)
Gerard Genette
Discourse: Nonnarrated Stories	139	(12)
Seymour Chatman
Reading as Construction	151	(14)
Tzvetan Todorov
The Literature of Replenishment	165	(12)
John Barth
The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique on the Sign and the Signifying Monkey	177	(24)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Reading for the Plot	201	(20)
Peter Brooks
Breaking the Sentence; Breaking the Sequence	221	(18)
Rachel Blau Duplessis
The Documentary Novel and the Problem of Borders	239	(16)
Barbara Foley
Politics, Literary Form, and a Feminist Poetics of the Novel	255	(20)
Joanne S. Frye
``The Pastime of Past Time'': Fiction, History, Historiographical Metafiction	275	(22)
Linda Hutcheon
``Building Up from Fragments'': The Oral Memory Process in Some Recent African-American Written Narratives	297	(14)
Helen Lock
Scheherazade's Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction	311	(28)
Wendy B. Faris
The Textualization of the Reader in Magical Realist Fiction	339	(12)
Jon Thiem
Are Fictional Worlds Possible?	351	(10)
Ruth Ronen
Chronoschisms	361	(26)
Ursula K. Heise
Queering Narratology	387	(12)
Susan S. Lanser
A Brief Story of Postmodern Plot	399	(12)
Catherine Burgass
On Voice	411	(32)
John Brenkman
What Interactive Narratives Do That Print Narratives Cannot	443	(28)
J. Yellowlees Douglas
A Media Migration: Toward a Potential Literature	471	(20)
Joseph Tabbi
Biographical Notes	491	(4)
Permissions	495	(4)
Index	499