INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY STUDY, YEAR I (Winter Semester 2021/22)

LECTURES 9-11
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Fictional prose genres

→ novella
→ short story
→ novel

development of the novel

→ medieval romances
→ Italian novellas
→ picaresque
→ characters
→ novels of character / novels of incident
→ epistolary novel
→ Gothic novel
→ prose romance
→ 19th-century realist novel / Victorian novel
→ naturalist novel
→ modernist novel
→ postmodernist novel

Hawthorne’s novel types

→ realistic fiction
→ romantic fiction

Frye’s novel types (Anatomy of Criticism, 1957)

→ novel
→ romance
→ confession
→ anatomy

selected novel types: subject matter, emphasis, artistic purpose

→ comedy of manners
→ sociological novel
→ historical novel
→ regional novel
→ Bildungsroman
→ Künstlerroman
→ anti-novel / nouveau roman
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genre fiction (popular fiction)
→ fantasy
→ science fiction
→ mystery / detective
→ romance
→ crime
→ horror
→ young adult
→ inspirational
→ chick-lit

the English novel vs the novel in English

Booker Prize / Pulitzer Prize

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Narration / narrative

mimesis / diegesis (showing / telling)

narrator
→ homodiegetic narrator / heterodiegetic narrator
→ first-person narrator (dramatised, overt, intrusive)
→ third-person narrator (non-dramatised, covert, non-intrusive)
→ omniscient narrator
→ limited narrator
→ reliable narrator / unreliable (fallible) narrator
→ second-person narrator

subjective narration / objective (dramatic narration)

focaliser (reflector, central consciousness, viewpoint character)

point of view
→ omniscient point of view
→ dramatic point of view
→ personal point of view

free indirect style (discourse, speech, thought)

interior monologue
stream of consciousness

story vs plot
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plot structure
→ Aristotle’s categories (hamartia, anagnorisis, peripeteia)
→ exposition, conflict, climax, denouement

handling of time
→ flashback (analepsis) / flashforward (prolepsis)
→ foreshadowing

breaking the fourth wall

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Resources:

➢ dictionaries of literary terms

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Selected literary examples for self-study

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first-person homodiegetic narrator

My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both
names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.
I give Pirrip as my father’s family name, on the authority of his tombstone and my sister – Mrs. Joe
Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of
either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what
they were like were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s
gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and
turn of the inscription, “Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,” I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was
freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a
neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine – who gave up
trying to get a living exceedingly early in that universal struggle – I am indebted for a belief I religiously
entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had
never taken them out in this state of existence.
Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My
first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a
memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place
overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana
wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger,
infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the
churchyard, intersected with dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the
marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the
wind was rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to
cry, was Pip.
Charles Dickens: Great Expectations
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first-person heterodiegetic narrator

1801. – I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled
with. This is certainly a beautiful country. In all England I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation
so completely removed from the stir of society – a perfect misanthropist’s heaven; and Mr. Heathcliff and I
are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us. A capital fellow! He little imagined how my
heart warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows, as I
rode up, and when his fingers sheltered themselves, with a jealous resolution, still further in his waistcoat,
as I announced my name.
“Mr. Heathcliff?” I said.
A nod was the answer.
“Mr. Lockwood, your new tenant, sir. I do myself the honour of calling as soon as possible after my
arrival, to express the hope that I have not inconvenienced you by my perseverance in soliciting the
occupation of Thrushcross Grange. I heard yesterday you had had some thoughts – ”
“Thrushcross Grange is my own, sir,” he interrupted, wincing. “I should not allow any one to
inconvenience me, if I could hinder it. Walk in!”
The “walk in” was uttered with closed teeth, and expressed the sentiment, “Go to the deuce.” Even the
gate over which he leant manifested no sympathizing movement to the words; and I think that circumstance
determined me to accept the invitation. I felt interested in a man who seemed more exaggeratedly reserved
than myself.
Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
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omniscient narrator

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and
wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the
Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain
the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the
impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible, or from one of our elder poets, in a paragraph of to-day’s
newspaper. She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia
had more common-sense. Nevertheless, Celia wore scarcely more trimmings; and it was only to close
observers that her dress differed from her sister’s, and had a shade of coquetry in its arrangements; for Miss
Brooke’s plain dressing was due to mixed conditions, in most of which her sister shared. The pride of being
ladies had something to do with it: the Brooke connections, though not exactly aristocratic, were
unquestionably “good”: if you inquired backward for a generation or two, you would not find any yard-
measuring or parcel-tying forefathers – anything lower than an admiral or a clergyman; and there was even
an ancestor discernible as a Puritan gentleman who served under Cromwell, but afterwards conformed, and
managed to come out of all political troubles as the proprietor of a respectable family estate. Young women
of such birth, living in a quiet country-house, and attending a village church hardly larger than a parlor,
naturally regarded frippery as the ambition of a huckster’s daughter. Then there was well-bred economy,
which in those days made show in dress the first item to be deducted from, when any margin was required
for expenses more distinctive of rank. Such reasons would have been enough to account for plain dress,
quite apart from religious feeling; but in Miss Brooke’s case, religion alone would have determined it; and
Celia mildly acquiesced in all her sister’s sentiments, only infusing them with that common-sense which is
able to accept momentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation.
George Eliot: Middlemarch
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limited narrator
While they talked, they were advancing towards the carriage; it was ready; and, before she could speak
again, he had handed her in. He had misinterpreted the feelings which had kept her face averted, and her
tongue motionless. They were combined only of anger against herself, mortification, and deep concern. She
had not been able to speak; and, on entering the carriage, sunk back for a moment overcome – then
reproaching herself for having taken no leave, making no acknowledgment, parting in apparent sullenness,
she looked out with voice and hand eager to shew a difference; but it was just too late. He had turned away,
and the horses were in motion. She continued to look back, but in vain; and soon, with what appeared
unusual speed, they were half way down the hill, and every thing left far behind. She was vexed beyond
what could have been expressed – almost beyond what she could conceal. Never had she felt so agitated,
mortified, grieved, at any circumstance in her life. She was most forcibly struck. The truth of this
representation there was no denying. She felt it at her heart. How could she have been so brutal, so cruel to
Miss Bates! How could she have exposed herself to such ill opinion in any one she valued! And how to suffer
him to leave her without saying one word of gratitude, of concurrence, of common kindness!
Time did not compose her. As she reflected more, she seemed but to feel it more. She never had been so
depressed. Happily it was not necessary to speak. There was only Harriet, who seemed not in spirits herself,
fagged, and very willing to be silent; and Emma felt the tears running down her cheeks almost all the way
home, without being at any trouble to check them, extraordinary as they were.
Jane Austen: Emma

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unreliable narrator

You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who
have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have
witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get
the sight out of their heads. Some one has said that the death of a mouse from cancer is the whole sack of
Rome by the Goths, and I swear to you that the breaking up of our little four-square coterie was such
another unthinkable event. Supposing that you should come upon us sitting together at one of the little
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tables in front of the club house, let us say, at Homburg, taking tea of an afternoon and watching the
miniature golf, you would have said that, as human affairs go, we were an extraordinarily safe castle. We
were, if you will, one of those tall ships with the white sails upon a blue sea, one of those things that seem
the proudest and the safest of all the beautiful and safe things that God has permitted the mind of men to
frame. Where better could one take refuge? Where better?
Ford Madox Ford: The Good Soldier
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free indirect style

. . . but scarcely had she begun, scarcely had they passed the sweep-gate and joined the other carriage, than
she found her subject cut up – her hand seized – her attention demanded, and Mr Elton actually making
violent love to her: availing himself of the precious opportunity, declaring sentiments which must be already
well known, hoping – fearing – adoring – ready to die if she refused him; but flattering himself that his
ardent attachment and unequalled love and unexampled passion could not fail of having some effect, and in
short, very much resolved on being seriously accepted as soon as possible. It really was so. Without scruple
– without apology – without much apparent diffidence, Mr Elton, the lover of Harriet, was professing
himself her lover. She tried to stop him; but vainly; he would go on and say it all. Angry as she was, the
thought of the moment made her resolve to restrain herself when she did speak. She felt that half this folly
must be drunkenness, and therefore could hope that it might belong only to the passing hour. Accordingly,
with a mixture of the serious and the playful, which she hoped would best suit his half and half state, she
replied.
‘I am very much astonished, Mr Elton. This to me! You forget yourself – you take me for your friend – any
message to Miss Smith I shall be happy to deliver; but no more of this to me, if you please!’
Jane Austen: Emma
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internal monologue

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men
were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning – fresh as if issued to children on a
beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges,
which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open
air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave;
the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did,
standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at
the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter
Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?” – was that it? – “I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was that it? He
must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace – Peter Walsh. He
would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull;
it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions
of things had utterly vanished – how strange it was! – a few sayings like this about cabbages.
She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass. A charming woman, Scrope Purvis
thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of
the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white
since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright.
For having lived in Westminster – how many years now? over twenty, – one feels even in the midst of
the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause;
a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out
it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such
fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees
it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest
frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt
with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the
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swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans,
sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the
strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.
Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway
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stream of consciousness

. . . and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer
first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and
Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say
stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with
the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and
their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows
who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons
and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the
steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those
handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and
Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the
wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman
going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson
sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer
little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums
and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair
like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I
thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked
me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to
me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
James Joyce: Ulysses (1922)

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flashforward

In observing this small winter scene, we are on safe ground. The tall young man would to the end of his days
wear double-breasted suits, would, being something of an engineer, always be gratified by large dazzling
vehicles, would, though a German and at this point in history a German of some influence, always be the
sort of man with whom a Polish chauffeur could safely crack a large, comradely joke.
Thomas Keneally: Schindler’s Ark
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foreshadowing

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist
were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed
Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the
more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of
a fine quotation from the Bible, or from one of our elder poets, in a paragraph of to-day’s newspaper.
George Eliot: Middlemarch
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breaking the fourth wall

And now, having brought this fiction to a thoroughly traditional ending, I had better explain that although all I have
described in the last two chapters happened, it did not happen quite in the way you may have been led to believe.
I said earlier that we are all poets, though not many of us write poetry; and so are we all novelists, that is, we
have a habit of writing fictional futures for ourselves, although perhaps today we incline more to put ourselves into
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a film. We screen in our minds hypotheses about how we might behave, about what might happen to us; and these
novelistic or cinematic hypotheses often have very much more effect on how we actually do behave, when the real
future becomes the present, than we generally allow.
John Fowles: The French Lieutenant’s Woman
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