Download or read book Essentials of the Theory of Fiction written by Michael J. Hoffman and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-07-06 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book Why We Read Fiction written by Lisa Zunshine and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why We Read Fiction offers a lucid overview of the most exciting area of research in contemporary cognitive psychology known as "Theory of Mind" and discusses its implications for literary studies. It covers a broad range of fictional narratives, from Richardson s Clarissa, Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment, and Austen s Pride and Prejudice to Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Nabokov's Lolita, and Hammett s The Maltese Falcon. Zunshine's surprising new interpretations of well-known literary texts and popular cultural representations constantly prod her readers to rethink their own interest in fictional narrative. Written for a general audience, this study provides a jargon-free introduction to the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field known as cognitive approaches to literature and culture.
Download or read book The Essentials of Theory U written by Otto Scharmer and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to the key concepts and applications in the author's classic book, this accessible resource illuminates the blind spot in leadership today and offers hands-on methods to help change makers overcome it through the process, principles, and practices of Theory U. --
Download or read book The Nature of Fiction written by Gregory Currie and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1990-10-26 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important book provides a theory about the nature of fiction, and about the relation between the author, the reader and the fictional text. The approach is philosophical: that is to say, the author offers an account of key concepts such as fictional truth, fictional characters, and fiction itself. The book argues that the concept of fiction can be explained partly in terms of communicative intentions, partly in terms of a condition which excludes relations of counterfactual dependence between the world and the text. This communicative model is then applied to the following problems: how can something be 'true in the story' without being explicitly stated in the text? In what ways does interpreting a fictional story depend upon grasping its author's intentions? Is there always a unique best interpretation of a fictional text? What is the correct semantics for fictional names? What is the nature of our emotional response to a fictional work? In answering these questions the author explores the complex interaction between author, reader, and text. This interaction requires the reader to construct a 'fictional author' - a character in the story whose personality, beliefs and emotional states must be interpreted if the reader is to grasp the meaning of the work.
Download or read book Literary Theory and Criticism written by Edgar Allan Poe and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essential anthology of Poe's critical works reviews works by Dickens, Hawthorne, many others. Includes Theory of Poetry ("The Philosophy of Composition," "The Rationale of Verse," "The Poetic Principle"). Introduction.
Download or read book The Art of Criticism written by Henry James and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1986-06-15 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of "the most important" of Henry James' Prefaces; "his studies of Hawthorne, George Eliot, Balzac, Zola, de Maupassant, Turgenev, Sainte-Beuve, and Arnold; and his essays on the function of criticism and the future of the novel."--P. [4] of cover.
Download or read book Chinese Theories of Fiction written by Ming Dong Gu and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2007-06-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative work, Ming Dong Gu examines Chinese literature and traditional Chinese criticism to construct a distinctly Chinese theory of fiction and places it within the context of international fiction theory. He argues that because Chinese fiction, or xiaoshuo, was produced in a tradition very different from that of the West, it has formed a system of fiction theory that cannot be adequately accounted for by Western fiction theory grounded in mimesis and realism. Through an inquiry into the macrocosm of Chinese fiction, the art of formative works, and theoretical data in fiction commentaries and intellectual thought, Gu explores the conceptual and historical conditions of Chinese fiction in relation to European and world fiction. In the process, Gu critiques and challenges some accepted views of Chinese fiction and provides a theoretical basis for fresh approaches to fiction study in general and Chinese fiction in particular. Such masterpieces as the Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase) and the Hongloumeng (The Story of the Stone) are discussed at length to advance his notion of fiction and fiction theory.
Download or read book How Fiction Works written by James Wood and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-07-22 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes a story a story? What is style? What’s the connection between realism and real life? These are some of the questions James Wood answers in How Fiction Works, the first book-length essay by the preeminent critic of his generation. Ranging widely—from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings—Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novel—plainspoken, funny, blunt—in the traditions of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. It sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision. It will change the way you read.
Download or read book The Language of Fiction written by Emar Maier and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together new research on fiction from the fields of philosophy and linguistics. Fiction has long been a topic of interest in philosophy, but recent years have also seen a surge in work on fictional discourse at the intersection between linguistics and philosophy of language. In particular, there has been a growing interest in examining long-standing issues concerning fiction from a perspective that is informed both by philosophy and linguistic theory. Following a detailed introduction by the editors, The Language of Fiction contains 14 chapters by leading scholars in linguistics and philosophy, organized into three parts. Part I, 'Truth, Reference, and Imagination', offers new, interdisciplinary perspectives on some of the central themes from the philosophy of fiction: What is fictional truth? How do fictional names refer? What kind of speech act is involved in telling a fictional story? What is the relation between fiction and imagination? Part II, 'Storytelling', deals with themes originating from the study of narrative: How do we infer a coherent story from a sequence of event descriptions? And how do we interpret the words of impersonal or unreliable narrators? Part III, 'Perspective Shift', focuses on an alleged key characteristic of fictional narratives, namely how we get access to the fictional characters' inner lives, through a variety of literary techniques for representing what they say, think, or see. The volume will be of interest to scholars from graduate level upwards in the fields of discourse analysis, semantics and pragmatics, philosophy of language, psychology, cognitive science, and literary studies.
Download or read book Love in Theory written by Ellen J. Levy and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2015-03-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this funny, brainy, thoroughly engaging debut collection, an award-winning writer looks at romance through the lens of scholarly theories to illuminate love in the information age. In ten captivating and tender stories, E. J. Levy takes readers through the surprisingly erotic terrain of the intellect, offering a smart and modern take on the age-old theme of love--whether between a man and woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman, or a mother and a child--drawing readers into tales of passion, adultery, and heartbreak. A disheartened English professor's life changes when she goes rock climbing and falls for an outdoorsman. A gay oncologist attending his sister's second wedding ponders dark matter in the universe and the ties that bind us. Three psychiatric patients, each convinced that he is Christ, give rise to a love affair in a small Minnesota town. A Brooklyn woman is thrown out of an ashram for choosing earthly love over enlightenment. A lesbian student of film learns theories of dramatic action the hard way--by falling for a married male professor. Incorporating theories from physics to film to philosophy, from Rational Choice to Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, these stories movingly explore the heart and mind--shooting cupid's arrow toward a target that may never be reached.
Download or read book Speculations on Speculation written by James E. Gunn and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science fiction is a field of literature that has great interest and great controversy among its writers and critics. This book examines the roots, history, development, current status, and future directions of the field through articles contributed by well-respected science fiction writers, teachers, and critics. This book can be used as a textbook for courses in theory as well as courses in science fiction literature and science fiction writing.
Download or read book Literary Theory written by David Carter and published by Oldacastle Books. This book was released on 2006-06-01 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pocket Essentials is a dynamic series of books that are concise, lively, and easy to read. Packed with facts as well as expert opinions, each book has all the key information you need to know about such popular topics as film, television, cult fiction, history, and more. It sounds daunting: all those -isms, long technical words, weird French thinkers, and incomprehensible Germans. Most books providing introductions to "Literary Theory" are long-winded tomes, guiding dogged readers through the twists and turns of critical analysis and logic. This small volume goes to the heart of the key concepts of Literary Theory, explaining them in clear everyday language. It provides witty and memorable comments and quotations, and enables the student of literature to raise the most pertinent and challenging questions, which even university professors have difficulty answering.
Download or read book Literary Theory written by Johannes Willem Bertens and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Edges of Fiction written by Jacques Rancière and published by Polity. This book was released on 2019-12-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What distinguishes fiction from ordinary experience is not a lack of reality but a surfeit of rationality – this was the thesis of Aristotle’s Poetics. The rationality of fiction is that appearances are inverted. Fiction overturns the ordinary course of events that occur one after the other, aiming to show how the unexpected arises, happiness transforms into unhappiness and ignorance into knowledge. In the modern age, argues Rancière, this fictional rationality was developed in new ways. The social sciences extended the model of causal linkage to all spheres of human action, seeking to show us how causes produce their effects by inverting appearances and expectations. Literature took the opposite path. Instead of democratizing fictional rationality to include all human activity in the world of rational knowledge, it destroyed its principles by abolishing the limits that circumscribed a reality peculiar to fiction. It aligned itself with the rhythms of everyday life and plumbed the power of the “random moment” into which an entire life is condensed. In the avowed fictions of literature as well as in the unavowed fictions of politics, social science or journalism, the central question is the same: how to construct the perceptible forms of a shared world. From Stendhal to João Guimarães Rosa and from Marx to Sebald, via Balzac, Poe, Maupassant, Proust, Rilke, Conrad, Auerbach, Faulkner and some others, this book explores these constructions and sheds new light on the constitutive movement of modern fiction, the movement that shifted its centre of gravity from its traditional core toward those edges in which fiction gets confronted with its possible revocation.
Download or read book Theory of Fiction Henry James written by Henry James and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1972-01-01 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprised of more than 250 selections from Henry James's stories about writers, his critical and speculative essays, his Notebooks, Prefaces, and letters, this collection brings together for the first time, in a single, systematic volume, all the important passages in James's work which have implications for or ideas about his theory of fiction. The result is the most comprehensive, exhaustive, and innovative volume of fictional theory ever published; in many ways it is the consummation of James's contribution to letters. In a masterful introductory essay, James E. Miller Jr., presents James's theory of fiction in outline; he also contributes brief introductions to each of the seventeen chapters, summarizing the major points. Abundant guides direct the reader to subjects and sources.
Download or read book Literary Theory written by David R. Carter and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pocket Essentials is a dynamic series of books that are concise, lively, and easy to read. Packed with facts as well as expert opinions, each book has all the key information you need to know about such popular topics as film, television, cult fiction, history, and more. It sounds daunting: all those -isms, long technical words, weird French thinkers, and incomprehensible Germans. Most books providing introductions to "Literary Theory" are long-winded tomes, guiding dogged readers through the twists and turns of critical analysis and logic. This small volume goes to the heart of the key concepts of Literary Theory, explaining them in clear everyday language. It provides witty and memorable comments and quotations, and enables the student of literature to raise the most pertinent and challenging questions, which even university professors have difficulty answering.
Download or read book The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction written by Ursula K. Le Guin and published by . This book was released on 2024-07-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
