The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)
Marina MacKay
Language: English
Pages: 230
ISBN: 052171334X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Beginning its life as the sensational entertainment of the eighteenth century, the novel has become the major literary genre of modern times. Drawing on hundreds of examples of famous novels from all over the world, Marina MacKay explores the essential aspects of the novel and its history: where novels came from and why we read them; how we think about their styles and techniques, their people, plots, places, and politics. Between the main chapters are longer readings of individual works, from Don Quixote to Midnight's Children. A glossary of key terms and a guide to further reading are included, making this an ideal accompaniment to introductory courses on the novel.
place he held in society.” As if a crisp summary of the “beginning and end of Sir Walter Elliot’s character” were not enough to instill total confidence that this narrator knows what she’s talking about, the amplification works to imply a shared cultural world: Sir Walter is vainer than most women; he is more snobbish than the menservants of the nouveau riche. The worldly authority with which Austen circulates these received ideas – that women are conceited and that new money (as opposed to
soldier Talbot against the self-serving opportunism of the Frenchified Highlander Fergus. By the time Scott is writing – sixty years later, the novel’s subtitle announces – the national division has been safely sutured. The Jacobites lost this second uprising, and the brutal obliteration of the Highland culture that had shored it up ensured that there would be no third. This is surely what makes it possible for Scott to write in such an even-handed way: you see the glorious as well as the
narrative forms of the “literary” novels – free indirect discourse (Brick Lane), unreliable first-person narration (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), epistolary (We Need to Talk About Kevin) – is this: form matters for literary fiction in a way it typically doesn’t matter for most genre fiction, which, however implausible its content, is usually traditionally “realist” in its narrative methods. It is because form matters that Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the
Although magical realism is a truly international form, other practitioners including such geographically diverse writers as the Indian-born Salman Rushdie, the Czech-born Milan Kundera, and the English Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson, the term emerged in South America and is most closely associated with the Latin American “Boom” of the 1960s: with the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, who had coined “lo real maravilloso” (“the marvelous real”) to describe the history of Latin America; with the hugely
think in apocalyptic terms. Conversationally we use the word “apocalypse” to mean any large-scale ending, but it tells you a great deal about our ideas of ending that the word literally means an unveiling, a revelation; indeed, some of the most famous novel endings explicitly recall that original meaning, as when, for instance, D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915) ends with the heroine Ursula Brangwen seeing in a rainbow “the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and