Aspects of the Novel (a brief and

concise insight into the 7 aspects)

Course name: Anglophone literary theories

Course Instructor: Sonja Vitanova-Strezova, PhD
Presenter: Boris Simonovski
 Characters/People

Flat vs Round characters

• Flat characters  Humour  Caricatures (17th c.)

• “Constructed around a single idea or quality”

• Example: “ ‘I never will desert Mr. Micawber.’ There is

Mrs. Micawber—she says she won’t desert Mr.
Micawber, she doesn’t, and there she is.”

Examples of flat characters:
Novels: Jane Bennet, Mrs. Bennet (Pride and
Prejudice), Mr. Linton (Wuthering Heights), Lady
Rowena (Ivanhoe), Kurz’s fiancée (Heart of
Darkness), Mrs. March (Little Women), King Arthur
(Le Morte D’Arthur).
Drama: Gill and Mac (The Second Shepherd’s Play),
The Cardinal (The Duchess of Malfi), The minor
characters in Marlowe’s plays (Dr. Faustus)
Benefits of flat characters:
1) “They are easily
recognized whenever they come in—
recognized by the reader’s
emotional eye, not by the visual eye,
which merely notes the
recurrence of a proper name.”
2) “They are easily remembered by the
reader afterwards. They remain in his
mind as unalterable for the
reason that they were not changed by
circumstances”.
3) “For we must admit that flat people
are not in themselves as big
achievements as round ones, and also
that they are best when they
are comic.”
Round characters

Examples of round characters:

Novels: Beckie Sharp (Vanity Fair), Jane Eyre (Jane Eyre), Joe (Little
Women), Victor Frankenstein & The Monster (Frankenstein),
Rebecca (Ivanhoe), Robinson Crusoe (Robinson Crusoe), Merlin (Le
Morte D’Arthur).

Drama: The Duchess of Malfi (The Duchess of Malfi), Dr. Faustus

(Dr. Faustus), Richard III, Shylock, Prospero (Shakespeare),
 Plot • A plot cannot be told to a gaping
audience of
cave men or to a tyrannical sultan or
• Different in terms of story to their modern descendant
the movie-public. They can only be
• Story  “A narrative of events arranged on the time kept awake by.
sequence”

• Plot  Same as the story, however with an emphasis

on causality.

• Typical example: Robinson Crusoe

Difference between a story and
a plot

Cause: Careless nature towards

his parents and his life

A disobedient Neglects his Ends up

father’s wishes Befriends Friday &
and hedonistic stranded on an
and becomes a returns to his native
young man island; turns to
sailor land safely
God

Cause: Disobedience towards God’s

word
Fantasy = “the undaily” (sth that allows the readers to daydream)

It asks us to pay something extra. It compels us to an

adjustment that is different to an adjustment required by a work of
art, to an additional adjustment. The other novelists say “Here is
something that might occur in your lives,” the fantasist says ‘Here’s
something that could not occur.’’

The power of fantasy penetrates into

every corner of the universe, but not into the forces that govern it—
the stars that are the brain of heaven, the army of unalterable law,
remain untouched—and novels of this type have an improvised air,
which is the secret of their force and charm. They may contain solid
character-drawing, penetrating and bitter criticism of conduct and
civilization;
 Fantasy is not merely defined by the use of
supernatural settings or being in Forster’s terms.
Moreover, it denotes the author’s innate and natural
talent of concocting a chain of events that are of
normal nature, yet uncommon to the ordinary
reader’s life. It is this meticulous care on the author’s
hand to masterfully bring forth these actions and
culminations that are of a realistic nature, however of
a likely minimal possibility for occurrence.
 Prophecy

• “Prophecy—in our sense—is a tone of voice”

• The requirements for the readers: humility and the suspension of the
sense of humour

• It is the implication that signifies and will filter into the turns of the
novelist’s phrase, and in this lecture, which promises to be so vague
and grandiose, we may come nearer than elsewhere to the minutiae of
style. We shall have to
attend to the novelist’s state of mind and to the actual words he
uses; we shall neglect as far as we can the problems of common sense.