JANE E. EVERSON
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780198160151
- eISBN:
- 9780191716386
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198160151.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Plot structure has most consistently been used as the touchstone for determining whether or not a poem could be classified as epic. It was the question of plot structure and subject matter that most ...
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Plot structure has most consistently been used as the touchstone for determining whether or not a poem could be classified as epic. It was the question of plot structure and subject matter that most exercised the critics of the genre in Italy from the mid-16th century, and it is intimately linked to questions of imitation and authorial intention. This chapter discusses the views of critics Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio and Giambattista Pigna. It then examines the extent to which the poems meet the criteria of Giraldi and Pigna, and how far their success in doing so derives from a conscious sense of the structure and subject matter of classical poems. It considers the poems in terms of formal structure, narrative disposition, choice of subject matter, and type of plot, discussing the extent to which in each of these areas the poems can be seen as legitimate descendants of the epic and how far instead they are exponents of a new genre.Less
Plot structure has most consistently been used as the touchstone for determining whether or not a poem could be classified as epic. It was the question of plot structure and subject matter that most exercised the critics of the genre in Italy from the mid-16th century, and it is intimately linked to questions of imitation and authorial intention. This chapter discusses the views of critics Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio and Giambattista Pigna. It then examines the extent to which the poems meet the criteria of Giraldi and Pigna, and how far their success in doing so derives from a conscious sense of the structure and subject matter of classical poems. It considers the poems in terms of formal structure, narrative disposition, choice of subject matter, and type of plot, discussing the extent to which in each of these areas the poems can be seen as legitimate descendants of the epic and how far instead they are exponents of a new genre.
Lorri G. Nandrea
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823263431
- eISBN:
- 9780823266623
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823263431.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
Misfit Forms re-interprets a series of choices that shaped the development of the British novel. Histories of the novel often situate the early nineteenth century as a culminating moment in the ...
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Misfit Forms re-interprets a series of choices that shaped the development of the British novel. Histories of the novel often situate the early nineteenth century as a culminating moment in the novel's “rise.” However, a look at the complicated junctions negotiated by the novel during the eighteenth century reveals not only achievements but also exclusions—paths less travelled. Pairing readings of novels by Defoe, Sterne, Gaskell, Hardy, and Charlotte Brontë with less familiar texts, including printer's manuals and grammar treatises, each chapter brings out an occluded mode. As argued in chapters 1 and 2, practices of typographical emphasis, and the correlated understanding of sensibility as sense-based communication of affect, offer different paradigms for relationship, desire, and pleasure than do the psychological idealizations of “transparent” typography and sympathetic identification. Chapter 3 shows that process-based cumulative narrative structures, declared primitive in relation to teleological plots, facilitate readerly pleasure in the representation of process, rather than subordinating means to ends. Chapter 4 argues that while most nineteenth-century novels privilege active curiosity and treat particulars as clues or signifiers, an alternative mode privileges passive wonder and presents particulars as singularities. Deleuze's theories of sexuality, minor language, singularity, and dynamic repetition help render these historical alternatives legible; they, in turn, invite us to reconstruct the novel's value as an arena for experience, as opposed to an epistemological tool.Less
Misfit Forms re-interprets a series of choices that shaped the development of the British novel. Histories of the novel often situate the early nineteenth century as a culminating moment in the novel's “rise.” However, a look at the complicated junctions negotiated by the novel during the eighteenth century reveals not only achievements but also exclusions—paths less travelled. Pairing readings of novels by Defoe, Sterne, Gaskell, Hardy, and Charlotte Brontë with less familiar texts, including printer's manuals and grammar treatises, each chapter brings out an occluded mode. As argued in chapters 1 and 2, practices of typographical emphasis, and the correlated understanding of sensibility as sense-based communication of affect, offer different paradigms for relationship, desire, and pleasure than do the psychological idealizations of “transparent” typography and sympathetic identification. Chapter 3 shows that process-based cumulative narrative structures, declared primitive in relation to teleological plots, facilitate readerly pleasure in the representation of process, rather than subordinating means to ends. Chapter 4 argues that while most nineteenth-century novels privilege active curiosity and treat particulars as clues or signifiers, an alternative mode privileges passive wonder and presents particulars as singularities. Deleuze's theories of sexuality, minor language, singularity, and dynamic repetition help render these historical alternatives legible; they, in turn, invite us to reconstruct the novel's value as an arena for experience, as opposed to an epistemological tool.
Kylee-Anne Hingston
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781789620757
- eISBN:
- 9781789629491
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789620757.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Prompted by Victorians’ frequent conflation of body and text, the introduction argues that Victorian fiction’s narrative form, specifically plot structure and focalization, contributed to the ...
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Prompted by Victorians’ frequent conflation of body and text, the introduction argues that Victorian fiction’s narrative form, specifically plot structure and focalization, contributed to the development of disability as a concept; in particular, as fiction’s form developed from the massive hybrid novels of the early decades of the nineteenth century to the case-study length of fin-de-siècle mysteries, disability became increasingly medicalized, moving from the position of spectacle to specimen. The chapter addresses focalization’s evocation of the perceiving body, linking focalization to theories of staring and the specular in disability studies, and it provides a history of scholarship on Victorian illness and disability, thus placing the book’s argument in the fields of narratology, disability studies, and Victorian studies.Less
Prompted by Victorians’ frequent conflation of body and text, the introduction argues that Victorian fiction’s narrative form, specifically plot structure and focalization, contributed to the development of disability as a concept; in particular, as fiction’s form developed from the massive hybrid novels of the early decades of the nineteenth century to the case-study length of fin-de-siècle mysteries, disability became increasingly medicalized, moving from the position of spectacle to specimen. The chapter addresses focalization’s evocation of the perceiving body, linking focalization to theories of staring and the specular in disability studies, and it provides a history of scholarship on Victorian illness and disability, thus placing the book’s argument in the fields of narratology, disability studies, and Victorian studies.
