Inner Workings of the Novel
Studying a Genre
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In the past, novelists regularly exploited formats and techniques borrowed from other genres—whether from collected correspondence, memoirs, diaries, or other generic traditions. Eventually, in every instance, .....
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It is easy to assume that the history of fiction begins in the earliest days of civilization. Human beings tell stories, after all. That is how we reiterate our meaning, how we understand reality, and how we a...
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To say that the popular and critical reception of Flaubert’s La tentation de saint Antoine (1874) was mixed, as its appreciation continues to be, is to be generous. One has to wonder about the real stature of Fla...
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The novel genre is appropriately named. Novelty rejuvenates it. As Grossvogel pointed out, however, “[T]he need for renewal is … constant.”1 When a technique has been exploited so often that readers expect whatev...
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To define the novel as a long prose fiction that is unified, coherent, and literary is by no means to set the genre in concrete, for the novel, though not living, is a changing form and cannot be immobilized. The...
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There are several things besides the pleasure of experiencing a masterpiece that should be noted on reading Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Most obviously, there is the asyndeton or absence of connectives...