Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics

ISBN-13: 9780415280228 / Angielski / Miękka / 2002 / 208 str.

Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan

Opis

What is a narrative? What is narrative fiction? How does it differ from other kinds of narrative? What features turn a discourse into a narrative text? This book turns its attention to these and other questions. Narrative Fiction is organized around issues - such as events, time, focalization, characterization, narration the text and its reading - rather than individual theorists or approaches. In following such a course, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan addresses key approaches to narrative fiction, from New Criticism to Phenomenology, but also offers views on and modifications to these theories. While presenting an analysis of the system governing all fictional narratives, whether in the form of novel, short story or narrative poem, she also suggests how individual narratives can be studied against the background of this general system. Throughout, she illustrates aspects of her study with numerous examples drawn from texts of different periods and national literatures. This edition is brought up-to-date with a new concluding chapter, which includes references to significant recent works in the field.

Recenzje

'An instructive account of the ways in which readers can, should and do read narrative fictions.' - Modern Fiction Studies

Spis treści

1. Introduction  2. Story: events  3. Story: characters  4. Text: time  5. Text: characterization  6. Text: focalization  7. Narration: levels and voices  8. Narration: speech representation  9. The text and its reading  10. Conclusion  11. Towards...:afterthoughts, almost twenty years later

O autorze

Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her most recent publications include A Glance Beyond Doubt: Narration, Representation, Subjectivity and Re-Reading Texts: Re-Thinking Critical Presuppositions. Her current projects concerns the concepts or narrative in different desciplines (psychoanalysis, historiography, legal studies and the medical humanities).