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 Myth and Method written by James Edwin Miller and published by . This book was released on 1960 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Literature and The Contemporary written by Roger Luckhurst and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-22 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the end of the century, much criticism has become devoted to `last things': the end of history, the end of the subject, the end of the novel, the end, even, of the end. Literature and the Contemporary, in contrast, aims to provide through twelve essays evidence of the way in which the literature of the 1990s is constantly engaging in questions of memory and history and the representation of time in the present day. The essays in the book survey theories of temporality from various cultural and philosophical standpoints, and represent critics writing from feminist, postcolonial and `queer' perspectives discussing literature in `our time'. The collection addresses such central issues as the politics of memory, colonial legacies, women's time, racial and sexual identities in the 1990s, and covers a wide range of contemporary authors, works and issues, some of which are treated for the first time. Among the contemporary works discussed are the prize-winning books Graham Swift's Last Orders, Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces, and Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres. While discussing some of the most significant novels of the 1990s, this collection also offers a diverse yet cohesive critique of the millennial leanings of much `postmodernist' criticism, which it argues should be replaced by more variously nuanced engagements with literature and the contemporary.
Download or read book Recent Theories of Narrative written by Wallace Martin and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Short Story Theories written by and published by Brill. This book was released on 2015-06-29 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective problematizes different aspects of the renewal and development of the short story. The aim of this collection is to explore the most recent theoretical issues raised by the short story as a genre and to offer theoretical and practical perspectives on the form. Centering as it does on specific authors and on the wider implications of short story poetics, this collection presents a new series of essays that both reinterpret canonical writers of the genre and advance new critical insights on the most recent trends and contemporary authors. Theorizations about genre reflect on different aspects of the short story from a multiplicity of perspectives and take the form of historical and aesthetic considerations, gender-centered accounts, and examinations that attend to reader-response theory, cognitive patterns, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, postcolonial studies, postmodern techniques, and contemporary uses of minimalist forms. Looking ahead, this collection traces the evolution of the short story from Chaucer through the Romantic writings of Poe to the postmodern developments and into the twenty-first century. This volume will prove of interest to scholars and graduate students working in the fields of the short story and of literature in general. In addition, the readability and analytical transparence of these essays make them accessible to a more general readership interested in fiction.
Download or read book Fiction Updated written by Calin Andrei Mihailescu and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Novels, movies, and lies - these are all fictions that provoke with their as ifs and what ifs. In response to the idea that fiction has somehow become an unfashionable topic in contemporary criticism, this volume argues that the question of fiction needs to be updated in the absence of a widely accepted theory of truth. This collection, dedicated to the noted scholar and literary critic Lubomir Dolezel, covers an extensive number of theoretical and historical issues relevant to our understanding of the status of fictions - literary or not." "Fiction Updated offers approaches to fiction and poetics that, in an imaginary topography of contemporary humanities, dwell at a distance from both the mimetic theory of literature and deconstruction. The contributors introduce new perspectives to the problem of fictionality, or broaden the scope of its applications, by examining the works of such authors as Homer, Casanova, Aristotle, Woolf, Vaihinger, Borges, Kundera, Coetzee, and Bakhtin."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Myth and Method written by James Edwin Miller and published by . This book was released on 1960 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Post Theories in Literary and Cultural Studies written by Zekiye Antakyalioglu and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-04-25 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Post-Theories in Literary and Cultural Studies focuses on the shifting paradigms in literary and cultural studies. Prompted by the changes and problems on the global scale, the last two decades have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest in theories which are more embedded in the social realities and human condition. This volume shows that theory can reinvent theory and re-define criticism according to the demands of the new millennium. In this context, it examines new ways of considering the relation of post-theory to the concepts such as ethics, aesthetics, truth, value, authenticity, human, and reality to understand the mindset of the new century. This volume presents the various suggestions and concerns of post-theoretical studies that reflect the sensibilities of the contemporary social and cultural life. The book is a source of reference to develop an understanding of this change of attitude in post-theoretical studies towards a more directly and sincerely responsive approach to the current problems worldwide, their representations in literature and language, reflections in theory, roots in socio-political domains, and effects on the material reality.
Download or read book Theories of Literary Realism written by Dario Villanueva and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1997-04-24 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Realism has not only shaped important schools and periods in literary history, but has also been a fundamental constant of all literature, its first theoretical formulation being the principle of mimesis in Aristotle's Poetics. Realism can be considered by extension one of the main aspects of literary theory, the aims of which must be to define its concepts clearly and to neutralize the imprecision, polysemy, and ambiguity that often characterized the application of realism.
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 Reframing Critical Literary and Cultural Theories written by Nicoletta Pireddu and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book participates in the ongoing debate about the alleged “death of theory” and the current post-theoretical condition, arguing that the “finitude” of theoretical projects does not mean “end”, but rather contingency and transformation of thinking, beyond irreconcilable doctrines. Contributors from different cultural and scholarly backgrounds and based in three different continents propose new areas of investigation and interpretive possibilities, reopening dialogues with past and present discourses from a plurality of perspectives and locations. After a first section that reassesses the status and scopes of critique, theory, and literature, the book foregrounds new or neglected critical vocabulary, literary paradigms, and narrative patterns to reread texts at the intersection with other branches of the humanities—history, philosophy, religion, and pedagogy. It then explores geopolitical, cultural, and epistemological domains that have been historically and ideologically overdetermined (such as postsocialist, postcolonial, and cosmopolitan spaces), recodifying them as unstable sites of both conflicts and convergences. By acknowledging the spatio-temporal and cultural delimitations of any intellectual practice, the book creates awareness of our own partiality and incompleteness, but treats boundaries as zones of contact, exchange, and conceptual mobility that promote crossings and connections.
Download or read book Metafiction written by Patricia Waugh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metafiction begins by surveying the state of contemporary fiction in Britain and America and explores the complex political, social and economic factors which influence critical judgment of fiction. The author shows how, as the novel has been eclipsed by the mass media, novelists have sought to retain and regain a wide readership by drawing on the themes and preoccupations of these forms. Making use of contemporary fiction by such writers as Fowles, Borges, Spark, Barthelme, Brautigan, Vonnegut and Barth, and drawing on Russian Formalist theories of literary evolution, the book argues that metafiction uses parody along with popular genres and non-literary forms as a way not only of exposing the inadequate and obsolescent conventions of the classic novel, but of stuggesting the lines along which fiction might develop in the future.
Download or read book C G Jung and Literary Theory written by S. Rowland and published by Springer. This book was released on 1999-04-26 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: C.G. Jung and Literary Theory remedies a significant omission in literary studies by doing for Jung and poststructuralist literary theories what has been achieved for Freud and Lacan. Offering radically new Jungian theories of deconstruction, feminism, the body, sexuality, spirituality, postcolonialism, reader-response, the book also investigates the controversial occult and fascist heritage of Jung. By using the work of Derrida, Kristeva and Irigaray and examining Jungian fiction, this book transforms modern literary theory in ways which simultaneously critique Jung's work.
Download or read book Why Literature Matters written by Rüdiger Ahrens and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Reading Theories in Contemporary Fiction written by Lisa McNally and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-06-27 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even after the upheavals wrought by Theory, literary criticism has generally ignored the act and experience of reading itself, proceeding as though something so fundamental to our experience of texts could be taken for granted. Reading Theories in Contemporary Fiction draws on deconstruction and the thought of Jacques Derrida to explore the ways in which contemporary fiction engages with reading, its power, the elusive nature of its experience and the failures of understanding inherent in it. Along the way, the book proceeds through close readings of such authors as J.M. Coetzee, David Mitchell, Toni Morrison and Philip Roth.
Download or read book Theories of Play and Postmodern Fiction written by Brian Edwards and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on developments in critical theory and postmodernist fiction, this study makes an important contribution to the appreciation of playforms in language, texts, and cultural practices. Tracing trajectories in theories of play and game, and with particular attention to the writings of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Derrida, the author argues that the concept of play provides perspectives on language and communication processes useful both for analysis of literary texts and also for understanding the interactive nature of constructions of knowledge Exploring manifestations of game and play throughout the history of Western culture, from Plato to Pynchon, this study traces developments in 20th-century cultural and literary theory of ideas about play in the writings of Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois, Jacques Ehrmann, Bernard Suits, James Hans, Mihai Spariosu and Robert Rawdon Wilson. The author emphasizes post-structuralist developments with specific attention to deconstruction and reception theory and argues that deconstruction makes the most significant recent contribution to play theory in its application to language and to literature The work also explores the modes and effects of playforms in particular examples of postmodernist fiction. With attention to major works from Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow), John Barth (LETTERS , Robert Kroetsch (What the Crow Said ), Angela Carter (Nights at the Circus ) and Peter Carey (Illywhacker ), Edwards acknowledges and deconstructs such basic oppositions as play and seriousness, fiction and truth, difference and identity to explore the literature's cultural/political significance. Seeking to affirm the fiction's continuing social relevance, the readings presented in this book place play irresistibly at the heartland of language, meaning and culture.
