Introduction to Literary Study (ILS)

 

Fiction

A literary work that is written about imaginary characters and events is based on imagination, not on reality. For example Plays, poems, short stories, etc.

Epic

A long narrative poem is usually related to the heroic deeds of a person of unusual courage and unparalleled bravery whose actions reflect the ideals and values of a certain culture, nation race, or religion.

Epic concern the universal address such as good, evil life, and death.

For example, Iliad and Odyssey ( 7 century BC) by Homer, Anneid Virgil's ( 70-19 BC), and Paradise Lost 1667 by John Milton.

Features of an Epic poem

Lengthy, depiction of character, narrative structure plot pattern, etc.

Romance

A narrative genre in literature that involves mysterious, adventures or spiritual storylines that focus on a quest that involves bravery and strong values. OR

A prose or verse story depicting heroic or marvelous deeds, romantic exploits usually in a historical or imaginary setting. it is also considered a precursor of the modern novel.

For example, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 2nd BC middle age and in ancient age Apuleius’s Golden Ass was written in prose form.

Features of Romance

Imaginary, nature as a source of spirituality, individuality, looking to the past for wisdom, supernatural power for a hero, narrative and plot the main character.

Novel

A long fiction story, typically representing character and action with some degree of realism

Content

There is a fairly standard range, with the shortest containing somewhere between 60-70,000 words and all but very longest coming in around  200,000. The story told in the novel are fictional pieces and the character in the novel interact themselves, their surroundings, and with one another. Novels focus on character development more than the plot and are long enough to support numerous or even groups of participants in the story's action.

 

HISTORY

The novel emerged in Spain during the seventeenth century and in England in the eighteenth century.

Examples In

England, Daniel Defoe’s (1660–1731) Robinson Crusoe (1719),

Samuel Richardson (1689–1761) Pamela (1740–41) and Clarissa

(1748–49), Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), and Laurence

Sterne (1713–68) and Tristram Shandy (1759–67) mark the

Beginning of this new literary genre, the Englishman Henry Fielding (1707–54) characterizes his novel

Joseph Andrews (1742) as a “comic romance” and “comic epic

The poem in prose,” The first half of the 19th century was influenced by the romanticism of the previous era. The focus was now on nature and imagination rather than intellect and emotion.

The rise of industrialization in the 19th century precipitated a trend toward writing that depicted realism. Novels began to depict characters that were not entirely good or bad, rejecting the idealism and romanticism of the previous genre. Realism evolved quickly into naturalism which portrayed harsher circumstances and pessimistic characters rendered powerless by the forces of their environment. Naturalist novels include "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe, which was a major catalyst for the American Civil War; "Tom Sawyer" (1876) and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1885), the latter of which is considered the great American novel written by Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens).

 

Types of Novel

1) Picaresque Novel

 A genre of prose fiction that depicts the adventures of a roguish hero of the low social class who lives by their wits in a corrupt society.

Picaresque novels typically adopt a realistic style, with elements of comedy and satire. This style of novel originated in Spain in 1554 and flourished throughout Europe for more than 200 years, though the term "picaresque novel" was only coined in 1810. It continues to influence modern literature. for example Hans Jacob Christoph von Grimmelshausen’s (c.1621–76) German Simplizissimus (1669), Daniel Defoe’s Moll, Flanders (1722) or Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) -Bildungsroman (novel of education)  examples as George Eliot’s(1819–80) Mill on the Floss (1860), or more recently in Doris Lessing’s (*1919) cycle Children of Violence (1952–69).

Features

A picaresque narrative is usually written in the first person as an autobiographical account.

The main character is often of low character or social class. They get by with wit and rarely deign to hold a job.

There is no plot. The story is told in a series of loosely connected adventures or episodes.

There is little if any character development in the main character. Once a pícaro, always a pícaro. Their circumstances may change but they rarely result in a change of heart.

The pícaro's story is told with a plainness of language or realism.

Satire is sometimes a prominent element.

The behaviour of a picaresque hero or heroine stops just short of criminality. Carefree or immoral rascality positions the picaresque hero as a sympathetic outsider, untouched by the false rules of society

Epistolary Novel

An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents.

The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings, and other documents are sometimes used. The epistolary form can add greater realism to a story because it mimics the workings of real life. It is thus able to demonstrate differing points of view without recourse to the device of an omniscient narrator.

 Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister was the first epistolary novel by Aphra Behan’s. The epistolary novel as a genre became popular in the 18th century in the works of such authors as Samuel Richardson, with his immensely successful novels Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1749).  In Germany, epistolary novels reached their with Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and in France with Pierre Choderlos de Laclo’s (1741-1803) The Dangerous Liaisons (1782.

Historical Novel

Historical novels show/depict the historically accurate setting based on past events. An essential element of the historical novel is that it is set in the past and pays attention to the manners, social conditions, and other details of the period depicted.

FEATURES

= The novel description is based on a narrative story,

= Setting is real-time or place of past

= Plot or action may include significant events in past

= Character may be real who contributed to past culture

= real and fiction are woven together

 Sir Walter Scott’s (1771–1832) English Waverly (1814),  Alexandra Dumas's (1802-1870) historical adventures story The Count of Monte Christo (1844-1846), the Name of Rose *(1980) by Italian literary critic Umberto Eco *(1932).

Utopian Novel

The genre of literature that explores the social and political structure issue regarding ideal society    Utopian fiction portrays a setting that agrees with the author's ethos, having various attributes of another reality intended to appeal to readers.

Examples Civitas Solis (City of the Sun) by Tomamso Campanella (Italy, 1623),   Christianopolis by Johann Valentin Andreae (Germany, 1619), We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (Russia, 1921) The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (Canada, 1985)

Science fiction Novel

 a genre of speculative fiction, typically dealing with imaginative concepts such as advanced science and technology, spaceflight, time travel, and extraterrestrial life. Science fiction often explores the potential consequences of scientific and other innovations.

Science fiction elements can include:

Temporal settings in the future, or in alternative histories.

Spatial settings or scenes in outer space, on other worlds, in subterranean earth, or in parallel universes.

Characters that include aliens, mutants, robots, enhanced humans, and other predicted or imagined beings.

Speculative or predicted technology such as brain-computer interface, bioengineering, super-intelligent computers, ray guns, and other advanced weapons.

Undiscovered scientific possibilities such as teleportation, time travel, and faster-than-light travel or communication.

New and different political and social systems and situations, including utopian, dystopian, post-apocalyptic, or post-scarcity.

Future history and evolution of humans on earth or on other planets.

Paranormal abilities such as mind control, telepathy, and telekinesis (e.g. "The Force" in Star Wars .

Examples A True Story by Lucian of Samosata ( 2nd century AD),  Johannes Kepler's Somnium (1620–1630),Cyrano de Bergerac's Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1657).

Gothic Novel

Gothic literature is a deliciously terrifying blend of horror and romance

Gothic novel Romantic, pseudomedieval fiction has a prevailing atmosphere of mystery and terror. Examples   Its origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole( 1717-1797), with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto and the German literature E.T.A  Hoffman’s ( 1772-1822) The Devil's Elixirs (1816). The famous Gothic novel 19th century Bram Stoker's (1847-1912) Dracula (1897).

Some common elements found in Gothic novels:

Gloomy, decaying setting (haunted houses or castles with secret passages, trapdoors, and other mysterious architecture)

Supernatural beings or monsters (ghosts, vampires, zombies, giants)

Curses or prophecies

Damsels in distress

Heroes

Romance

Intense emotions

Detective novel

Detective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a detective (professional, amateur, or retired) investigates a crime, often murder.

Examples one of the best known of which is Agatha Christie’s (1890–1976) Murder on the Orient Express (1934). Friedrich Schiller's (1752-1805) The Criminal of lost Honour (1792), Female detective such as in Patricia Cornwell's (1956).Ethnic background such as Native American detective in Tony Hillerman's and the thriller The Da Vinci Code (2003) by American author Dan Browns.

The elements of the detective story are:

(1) the seemingly perfect crime; (2) the wrongly accused suspect at whom circumstantial evidence points; (3) the bungling of dim-witted police; (4) the greater powers of observation and superior mind of the detective; and (5) the startling and unexpected denouement, in which the detective reveals how the identity of the culprit was ascertained.

Short Story

An invented prose narrative shorter than a novel usually deals with a few characters and aims at unity of effect and often concentrates on the creation of mood rather than plot.

Length: short stories typically range from 1600 to20,000 to thousand words. Also, take 30minute to read

Subject: focus on single themes or object

Limited character: due to the limitation of genre short stories typically focus on just one or a couple characters.

Example: THE Arabian thousands and one night. Giovanni Boccaccio’s (1313–75) Italian Decamerone (1349–51), Geoffrey Chaucer’s (c. 1343–1400) Canterbury Tales (c. 1387– 1400), Marguerite de Navarre's (1494-1549) Spanish Haptameron (1558) and the tomb of Saint Thomas Becket in the Canterbury Tales.

Novella or Novelette

A novella is a text of written, fictional, narrative prose normally longer than a short story but shorter than a novel, somewhere between 7,500 and 40,000 words.

A novella is the richest and most rewarding form of literary genre because this genre allows an extended development of characters and themes than a short story does without making detailed structure demand of the complete book. Thus a novella provides detail and intense exploration of a topic, providing both complete foci of the short story and boar’s scope of a novel.

For example Joseph Conrad’s (1857–1924) Heart of Darkness (1902) The Abbess of Castro (1832) French writer Stendhal (1783-1842), Guy de Maupassant(1850-1893) Le Horla (1887)In Germany, Theodor Storm's (1817-1888) Aqua Submerses (1876).In English Joseph Conrad’s (1857-1924)   HEART of Darkness (1902). Francis Ford Coppola's (1939) Apocalypse Now (1979).