bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Bakhtin, Mikhail
Authors: Hitchcock Peter
Published: July 2017

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895–1975) has emerged as a major analyst of the ways we understand culture in general and the novel in particular. Rediscovered in Russian intellectual life in the late 1950s, he has since become a significant touchstone in cultural analysis. While he lived in relative obscurity in the Soviet Union in his middle years, by the end of his life Bakhtin had achieved a major reputation in thinking aboutgenre,discourse,timeandspace, ethics, and historical poetics. Some of the terms we associate with his work, such as chronotope, dialogism, the carnivalesque, the grotesque, architectonics, exotopy, heteroglossia, and eventness have become influential keywords in contemporary critique. With conferences, journals, institutes, and a large body of secondary material devoted to his work, Bakhtin has become an iconic figure in writing and research in the humanities, but not one who is beyond controversy and heated academic dispute. For instance, there has been much disagreement over Bakhtin's authorship of several texts by Ivan Ivanovich Kanaev (1893–1963), Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev (1891–1938), and Valerian Nikolaevich Voloshinov (ca. 1894–1936), associates of what would become known as the Bakhtin Circle. This is not the place to enter this debate, but clearly the attribution in particular ofFormalny metod v literaturovedeni(1928,The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship)by Medvedev andMarksizm i filosofiya yazyka(1929,Marxism and the Philosophy of Language)by Voloshinov to Bakhtin extends and deepens the critical range of his interests. There is also evidence Bakhtin plagiarized Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), among others, for his book on Rabelais, although for the most part this has not hurt Bakhtin's burgeoning reputation (Poole).
Baltic States
Authors: Berindeanu Florin
Published: July 2017

This entry focuses on the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The Baltic countries are at the intersection of Western and Eastern elements that combine to make them distinctively hybrid societies. From the linguistic point of view, Latvian and Lithuanian are among the oldest languages, as they belong to the Sanskrit family of Indo‐European culture. There is thus a blending of major European faiths in Baltic culture (Western Catholicism, Protestantism, and Slavic Orthodoxy), and linguistic amalgamation (Germanic and Slavic) which feed and inform the narrative structures and literary output as a whole. Baltic cultures also benefit from other influences, e.g., Scandinavian, Russian, and Jewish. And at a strictly political level, in any analysis of modern Baltic societies it is fundamental to consider their annexation by the Soviet Union for almost eighty years, a historical experience that has had deep consequences for cultural life.
Censorship
Authors: Ladenson Elisabeth
Published: July 2017

Under “novel,” Gustave Flaubert's
Dictionary of Accepted Ideas
claims novels “Corrupt the masses” (1913, trans. J. Barzun). Flaubert knew what he was talking about, since the trial of
Madame Bovary
in France in 1857 is perhaps the most notorious literary censorship trial of all. Novels have always been viewed by censors and would‐be censors as a particularly dangerous literary form, given their potential appeal to a broad readership, and especially a female readership, as in the case of
Madame Bovary
. The particular aspects of fictional narrative that have been perceived as dangerous, and the measures undertaken to meet that danger, have changed over the course of time.
Character
Authors: Frow John
Published: July 2017

Fictional character takes many forms. We recognize Brer Rabbit or Reynard the Fox, the goddess Hera or Thomas the Tank Engine as quasi‐persons, figures that move us in the way that only stories about a recognizably human destiny can move us. To “recognize” means both that we find a frame for understanding what kind of being this is, and that we see ourselves in these figures‐“ourselves” only in the most general, anthropomorphic sense that we translate animals or gods or steam trains into human‐like figures which will fit into our stories—and on that basis we project something more specific onto them, and draw something more specific from them. We like them or dislike them, identify with them or disapprove of them. We distinguish the white hats from the black hats, and we get emotionally involved with them.
Class
Authors: Lesjak Carolyn
Published: July 2017

Karl Marx'sCapital, vol. 3 famously breaks off with two questions about class: “What makes a class?” and “What makes wage‐labourers, capitalists and landlords the formative elements of the three great social classes?” (1981, 1025–26). These questions, unanswered in any systematic way in Marx's writings, shape the early history of discussions of class, a discussion, importantly, that really only begins in the mid‐nineteenth century, when the language of class gradually replaces the earlier language of rank and order. As Raymond Williams clarifies, “The essential history of the introduction of class … relates to the increasing consciousness that social position is made rather than merely inherited. All the older words, with their essential metaphors of standing, stepping and arranging in rows, belong to a society in which position was determined by birth” (1976,Keywords, 61–62). The history of class as we now understand it, then, is primarily a history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Cognitive Theory
Authors: Vermeule Blakey
Published: July 2017

Cognitive theory is a new field of literary inquiry, having only begun to attract interest in the late 1990s. It now includes a wide array of approaches and ideas in a host of different subdisciplines. It connects with such well‐established fields inlinguisticsas semantics, pragmatics, and the study of syntax. It also asks why we have the metaphors we do, how we process conceptual patterns in texts, and why poets and novelists converge on certain forms over and over again. Cognitive theory also takes in global concerns, such as the question of whether narrative is an adaptation or a by‐product of other evolved capacities; how we empathize with fictional characters (and whether such empathy has the sorts of pro‐social effects often claimed by critics); and what kinds of violations in our ordinary conceptual categories drive narrative interest.
Comparativism
Authors: Komar Kathleen L.
Published: July 2017

Most studies of the novel are comparative. When critics examine a single volume, they usually contextualize it by placing it among other novels of its time, or its
national
literature, or other texts written by the same author. Ian Watt's 1957 study,
The Rise of the Novel
, examines the
genre
and the society that enabled its survival. Watt contextualizes and investigates genre, analyzes and compares individual British texts, and reads the novel in light of the British and continental philosophical traditions of the eighteenth century. All of these are comparative forms of analysis in a general sense.
Dialogue
Authors: Thomas Bronwen
Published: July 2017

Most novels feature scenes of interaction between characters where the role of the narrator as a controlling presence is at a minimum. Such scenes are vital for characterization and building a sense of the relationships between characters. They also help to advance the plot, set the scene for the reader, and break up the tempo and pace of the narrative (see
narrative technique
). The direct representation of character speech has been crucial in opening up the novel to new voices, e.g., regional
dialect
and working‐class speech in the nineteenth‐century novel, or creoles and pidgins in postcolonial fictions. Studies of speech in the novel have provided exhaustive accounts of the sheer number of linguistic varieties that have been incorporated into the novel, and have raised important questions about the extent to which such representations aim for realism. Studies of fictional dialogue draw more explicitly on linguistic (see
linguistics
) models of conversational interaction to focus on the interplay and power dynamics between participants, and to evaluate how far such representations maybe described as dialogic in Mikhail
bakhtin's
sense of the word. Analysis of speech‐in‐interaction in the novel increasingly engages with philosophical and ideological notions of dialogue in an attempt to understand how far “the idea of dialogue” may be both normative and culturally inscribed.
Dictatorship Novel
Authors: Balderston Daniel
Published: July 2017

The long series of novels about Latin American dictators is initiated by the Spanish writer Ramon Maria del Valle‐Inclán's 1926 novelTirano Banderas (The Tyrant), about an imaginary dictator named Santos Banderas, whose country is an amalgam of various parts of Latin America. However, some claim Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's 1845 biography of Juan Facundo Quiroga (1788–1835),Facundo: Civilización y barbarie (Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism), as the most important Latin American antecedent. The next major texts of the subgenre are the hallucinatoryEl señor Presidente(1946,The President)by the Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias, based on the life of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1857–1924), andEl gran Burundun‐Burundá ha muerto(1952,The Great Burundun‐Burundá is Dead)by the Colombian Jorge Zalamea. However, the most important group of novels is a trio from the 1970s:Yo el Supremo(1974,I the Supreme)by the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos,El recurso del método(1975,Reasons of State)by the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, andEl otoño del patriarca(1975,The Autumn of the Patriarch)by the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez. As Roberto González Echevarría suggests, the exploration of total power in these three texts is also an exploration of the possibilities of the totalizing novel, in which a strange identification takes hold between the novelist and his subject. This marked the end of the triumphant period of the Latin American “Boom” novel of the 1960s.
Fiction
Authors: Kristal Efraín
Published: July 2017

In English,
fiction
is a term commonly used to refer to, and even to define, the novel as a literary
genre
(see
definitions
). In its colloquial sense the word
fiction
suggests a contrivance, a belief, or a statement that is false but that is held to be true; a fiction in this sense can be a lie, a deception, or a willful distortion. The supposition that all fictions are lies is predicated on the unfortunate projection of the colloquial meaning of the word onto the practice of storytelling. Fictions can be jokes, thought experiments, grammatical exercises, and the like. Fictions, therefore, are not necessarily literary, and there are many works of literature that make no claims to fictionality, especially in essayistic and lyrical modes. A
narrative fiction
is a story with imaginary characters and events, and sometimes with imaginary places and objects as well. Not every element in a work of narrative fiction is invented or imagined, but the possibility to tell a story that can draw loosely on facts and freely on the imagination to invent or to embellish, as a perspicacious character in Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's
Don Quixote
(1605, 1615) observes, allows “the pen to run without obstacles offering a good mind the opportunity to display itself (chap. 47).
Figurative Language and Cognition
Authors: Popova Yanna
Published: July 2017

The distinction between literal and figurative (nonliteral) language reflects a traditional understanding in
linguistics
and
rhetoric
of what constitutes the nature of meaning in language. Thus, it is commonly assumed that the literal meanings of words or sentences are somehow fixed, direct, and do not deviate from their respective dictionary meanings. Figurative meanings, on the other hand, involve indirectness and require further interpretation. There are several forms of figurative language (also known as figures of speech) such as metaphor, metonymy, simile, irony, idiom, and proverb. Some scholars include also oxymoron, hyperbole, and zeugma, among others. While providing a brief description of each major form of figurative language, this entry concentrates on theories and psychological data on metaphor as a main exemplar of the general human ability to speak and think figuratively. It summarizes the vast number of theoretical and experimental approaches to this most creative and intriguing human ability, namely the faculty to think and speak figuratively. In the rest of this entry, unless specifically stated otherwise, metaphor, figurality, and figurative language and meaning are used interchangeably.
Formalism
Authors: Fore Devin
Published: July 2017

The Russian formalists were an eclectic constellation of figures from a variety of fields, including literary criticism,linguistics, philology, and ethnology who from 1915 through 1930 produced a diverse corpus of scholarship on aesthetic form and cultural value. Although their principal objects of study were literary texts, the formalists also wrote on other modes of cultural expression such as film, oratory,journalism, andlife writing.
Frame
Authors: Thomas Bronwen
Published: July 2017

The term
frame
is used in a metaphorical sense when applied to the novel. It borrows from the idea of a frame to a painting and is primarily used to denote borders and levels within the narrative, or how the actions and words of the fictional characters are shaped and presented to the reader. In theory, therefore, the metaphor suggests that a novel has stable and clearly defined boundaries. It also intrinsically implies a clear dichotomy between “outer” and “inner” worlds. This is most clearly the case where the frame narrator's account of events is portrayed as objective, in contrast to the subjectivity of the inset narratives. The extent to which this framing is foregrounded and overt may vary considerably, but the device typically serves to remind readers that the story world is separate from their own and draws attention to the act of telling and to the figure of the storyteller, casting doubt on the extent to which any one telling will suffice.
France (18th Century)
Authors: Stewart Philip
Published: July 2017

Anyone who was asked in 1700 or even 1730 to name the greatest French novel would very probably have citedLes Aventures de Télémaque(ca. 1696,The Adventures of Telemachus)by Archbishop François de Fénelon, a didactic work that actually had been written as part of an education program for the dauphin (eldest son of the king of France). For its classical purity and cadences it was also often described as a “poem in prose.” No fact better illustrates how much not only tastes but also genres have changed: todayT'elemaque, given its highly stylized structure and style, and the fact that it is, after all, a sort of high‐minded pastiche of Homer, would be an unlikely candidate for inclusion in that literary category at all, let alone selected as the best.
F
rance (20th Century)
Authors: Viers‐Andronico Carole , Wiedorn Michael
Published: July 2017

What most distinguishes the twentieth‐century French‐language novel from its literary predecessors is its resistance to convenient categorizations or mappings onto literary movements. Rather than movements, a series of currents emerge centering upon philosophical, theoretical, and aesthetic concepts (such as existentialism, absurdism, and the
nouveau roman)
, and ranging from the anticolonial novel to
littérature de la banlieue
(literature of the ghetto). This diversity of the novel form raises the question: “Is the novel still the novel?” Indeed, the twentieth‐century novel witnessed more manifestos than movements, more diversity than unity in schools of thought, and more heterogeneity than homogeneity of forms and themes.
Gender Theory
Authors: Kennedy Rosanne
Published: July 2017

Gender became a significant critical concept in the wake of developments in
feminist
theory in the early 1980s. In common usage,
gender
refers to socially constructed differences between men and women, while
sex
refers to biological differences. Feminist theorists have challenged this normative sex/gender distinction, arguing that sex, as well as gender, is culturally constructed. Informed by and contributing to developments in feminist theory, feminist literary critics have explored how gendered differences, meanings, and identities are produced in the novel and related discourses, and how subjects are positioned by those discourses. Although feminist critics initially used the concept of gender to refer exclusively to women, by the late 1980s “gender” was expanded to encompass masculinities and gay and lesbian identities, and
sexuality
became an increasingly important concept. Today gender, sex, and sexuality are contested concepts in and between the fields of feminist theory,
queer
theory, and masculinity studies.
German Novel
Authors: Kacandes Irene
Published: July 2017

Goethe, Mann, Kafka, Canetti.
The Sorrows of Young Werther, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Man Without Qualities, The Tin Drum
. The novel is barely conceivable without the contribution of literature written in the German language, and yet, the German novel is rarely the focus in general histories of the
genre
(see
history
). To be sure, the development of the German novel can be understood through many of the same categories that have been used to explain the Spanish, French, or English novel. There are German
picaresque
,
epistolary
,
historical
, realist (see
realism
), modernist (see
modernism
), postmodernist and even magical realist novels (see
magical realism
). Explanations of these terms as well as histories of the novel in other European countries, particularly in France and England, would apply in great part to the German case. This entry, therefore, presents certain historical factors, in distinction to those countries, influencing the development of the German novel and points to central contributions of the German novel to world literature: Modernist experimentation, the processing of
national
trauma, and multiculturalism.
H
ebrew Novel
Authors: Hasak‐Lowy Todd
Published: July 2017

The unique features of the Hebrew novel, especially during its early stages, can be traced back to the unusual condition and evolution of Hebrew during the nineteenth century in Eastern Europe. Though never a dead language by any means, it had long since ceased to be a spoken language. By this time its use was restricted primarily to prayer and religious study, though more secular genres, such as business correspondences, travel books, and poetry, were occasionally composed in Hebrew as well. Over the course of the
Haskalah
, or Jewish Enlightenment (ca. 1770–1880), a small minority of Jewish men, who like many of their peers had acquired mastery of Hebrew through intensive study of the Hebrew Bible (i.e., the Old Testament) and its commentaries, began applying their knowledge of this language to the production of radically new types of nonreligious texts. Such study was essentially off limits to women. These assimilating and secularizing writers were intent on engaging the forms of contemporary European culture, including prose fiction. Hebrew, as a language with a long‐standing, widely recognized aesthetic dignity among Jews and non‐Jews alike, presented itself as an attractive alternative to their native Yiddish. Nevertheless, turning Hebrew into a language capable of meeting the linguistic demands of the novel was a challenging project that lasted many decades. The first Hebrew novel—Abraham Mapu's
Love of Zion
‐was published in 1853, but was little more than a pastiche of biblical phrases. By drawing extensively on rabbinical Hebrew, which has a much larger vocabulary and a more flexible syntax than its biblical counterpart, the novelist S. Y. Abramovitz developed the first viable Hebrew prose style in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Iran
Authors: Talattof Kamran
Published: July 2017

As a specifically literary genre, the Persian novel may have had its roots in the Western tradition, especially if we consider the fact that the rise of the Persian novel followed a wave of translation of European and particularly French novels into Persian (Balay, Kamshad). And as far as early novelistic themes are concerned, they were devoted to historical events (Aryanpur, Kamshad, Yavari). However, one may also consider the long tradition of classical narrative poetry, fable writing, poetic romances, and prose fiction as indigenous sources of the Persian novel. In this vein, the narrative poetry of Hakīm Abu'l‐Qāsim Firdawsī Tūsī (940–1020) and Nezami (ca. 1141–1209), the Indo‐Iranian stories of “One Thousand and One Nights,” koranic/biblical stories, and the popular legend of Amir Asrsalan Namdar, which were circulated in society orally for many centuries before being written down, are prime examples. Christophe Balay believes that the latter work is the last story to be written in the old, traditional form of narrative. Like
mikhail bakhtin
, Balay cautiously uses the term novel in association with old or long narrative stories. This relationship between the old and the new is present more strongly between classical Persian short stories and the European
genre
of short story, an analysis of which can help further understanding of the changes that Persian prose has experienced since the nineteenth century.
Italy
Authors: Clark Samantha , Erspamer Francesco
Published: July 2017

Italy boasts one of the richest literatures in the world, with a tradition dating from the thirteenth century and influencing the development of many
genres
, including narrative and lyrical poetry, the novella, the pastoral, drama, and opera—but not the novel. It is significant that the most acclaimed Italian novel, Alessandro Manzoni's
I promessi sposi
(1827,
The Betrothed)
, inescapable reading in Italian schools, has attracted far less attention abroad than works by his contemporaries Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, Nikolay Gogol, Charles Dickens, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, all of whom understood that narrative prose, unlike poetry, demanded a continuity and
quantity
of works, and not quality alone. Manzoni wrote and rewrote a single novel, succeeding in creating a masterpiece and a national treasure but failing to reach the critical mass that would have been needed to establish fiction as the dominant tool for expressing collective feelings and desires. It took almost fifty years before Giovanni Verga and Gabriele D'Annunzio, the greatest novelists of newly unified Italy, started ambitious cycles—end‐of‐the‐century
comédies humaines
. Still, poetry remained Italy's most prestigious genre until WWII; and when narrative fiction took over, the vast majority of bestsellers were translations of stories imported from the U.S., Northern Europe, and South America. Italian literature's resistance to its democratization and commodification persisted until the last years of the twentieth century. It was Andrea Camilleri, an extremely prolific writer (unlike Manzoni), who finally legitimized mysteries (see
detective
) and other forms of popular fiction, overcoming the scorn of critics and serious authors and providing the Italian novel with the full flexibility that it needed to give voice to a society in rapid transformation.
Japan
Authors: Zwicker Jonathan E.
Published: July 2017

Early in 1942, Nakajima Atsushi (1909–42), then teaching Japanese at an elementary school in the occupied territory of Palao, published a short story set in ancient Assyria (669–633bce):“Mojika” (“The Curse of Letters”), centers on a scholar who comes to discover the accursed nature of writing. “As he stared at length at a single letter,” Nakajima writes, “that letter would, without his noticing, dissolve and he could only see it as a tangle of individual lines with no meaning. And he could no longer understand how a simple grouping of lines had come to have a particular sound and a particular meaning” (123). And this is essentially how it is with the Japanese novel: the more one looks at it, the less sense it seems to make and the more artificial it seems, based purely on convention.
Latina/oAmerican Novel
Authors: Padilla Yolanda
Published: July 2017

The term “Latino” (or Latina when referring to women) refers to people of Latin American descent raised in the U.S. Also referred to as “Hispanics,” Latinas and Latinos have published novels at least since the nineteenth century. Certain historical circumstances and cultural themes bind these narratives together into a vibrant “tradition,” but one should note that they are not reducible to mere history, sociology, or culture, and that, as Ortiz argues of Latina/o novelists, “their approaches to the act of narrative are as various as their distinct senses about how exactly history and fiction can and should most productively inform one another” (524–25). Generally speaking, the Latino Novel is marked by a focus on Latinas/os as simultaneous insiders/outsiders in relation both to the U.S. and to their ancestral homelands. Language is often one marker of this state. Numerous novels have been written in Spanish, including Aristeo Brito'sEl diablo en Texas(1976,The Devil in Texas), Roberto G. Fernandez'sLa vida es un special(1982, Life is a Special), and Erlinda Gonzáles‐Berry'sPaletitas de guayaba(1991,On a Train Called Absence). However, most Latina/o novelists work in English, largely because that is often the language in which they received their education, but also for pragmatic marketing reasons; it is more difficult to find a publisher and a readership in the U.S. for books written in Spanish. Yet, even when writing in English, Latina/o authors engage in “tropicalizations” of the language; they might use literal translations of idiomatic expressions from Spanish to English, e.g.,dar a luz(“to give light”) for “to give birth,” or code‐switch to produce a richly nuanced “Spanglish,” to name two examples (F. R. Aparicio, 1997, “On Sub‐Versive Signif‐iers,” inTropicalizations, ed. Aparicio and S. Chávez‐Silverman, 203–6). In so doing, they mark the persistence of Latino culture in their writing.
Metafiction
Authors: Gui Weihsin
Published: July 2017

Metafiction is often used to describe
avant‐garde
works by American and British writers published from the 1960s up to the early 1990s, and is considered an important component of postmodernist literary style. The term was introduced by American novelist William H. Gass to describe writing “in which the forms of fiction serve as the material upon which further forms can be imposed” (25). Elaborating on Gass's definition, Patricia Waugh glosses metafiction as writing “which self‐consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (2). The increasing presence of metafiction in literature during this period is connected to sociopolitical changes in the U.S. and Britain, such as the civil rights and feminist movements and the introduction of French structuralist and poststructuralist theories of language and signification into the Anglo‐American academy (see
structuralism
), as well as the translation into English of works by South American writers such as Jorge Luis Borges's
Ficciones
(1944,
Fictions
) and Gabriel García Márquez's
Cienaños de soledad
(1967,
One Hundred Years of Solitude)
. Some features of metafiction include self‐reflexiveness about the writing process, anxiety and uncertainty regarding the authenticity of representation, and playfulness and irony in narrative voice, as well as the authorial manipulation of linguistic signs and systems. Peter Ackroyd's
Chatterton
(1987), John Fowles's
The French Lieutenant's Woman
(1969), William H. Gass's
Omensetter's Luck
(1966), Iris Murdoch's
The Black Prince
(1973), and Vladimir Nabokov's
Pale Fire
(1962) are important examples of metafictional novels from this period.
Modernism
Authors: Caserío Robert L.
Published: July 2017

The term modernist in the early twentieth century came to mean an iconoclastic response to long‐established conventions. (The meaning partly derives from a turn‐of‐the‐century adjective for rebellion against orthodox religious authority.) In the
history
of fiction, the modernist novel stands out for the ways in which its content subverts traditions of social order and moral conduct. Complementing the subversive aims, modernist fiction disruptively experiments upon inherited forms of representation, and opposes ordinary or clichéd uses of language and ideas.
Narration
Authors: Maloney Edward
Published: July 2017

The term narration is most commonly understood as the act of telling a story. But there are other relatively common understandings: a synonym for an entire narrative; a description of the verbal medium of narrative fiction; a rhetorical device different from argument, exposition, or description; and as the binary opposite of dialogue. For the purposes of this entry, I will limit myself to a discussion of narration as
the production of a narrative
, including how a narrator tells a story, the context and situation in which this recounting takes place, and the complex dynamics involved in any telling. This definition follows Gérard Genette's tripartite division of narrative into discourse,
story
, and narration. Genette separates narrative discourse
(récit)
, from the events the discourse purports to recount
(histoire)
, and at the same time separates the discursive text from the act of telling
(narration)
that produces the narrative. Despite the usefulness of Genette's distinction, later narratologists often combine the concepts of discourse and narration under the heading “narrative discourse,” highlighting the presentation of a story from the story itself. Because of its central role in the presentation of any story, narration involves a number of narrative techniques employed in narrative fiction (e.g., perspective, voice, etc.) and their related concerns and distinctions. Of course, the novel is not a homogeneous category, and novelists have often pushed the limits of narrative convention in order to produce desired effects. Consequently, our understanding of narration should follow novelistic practice rather than legislate it.
Narrative Structure
Authors: Nash Katherine Saunders
Published: July 2017

Narrative structure is the set of relations among the constituent parts of a narrative, as well as between those parts and the narrative as a whole. Narrative structure has proven a vital if elusive object of study for narrative theorists, in part because of the relationship between structure and narrative competence. Narrative competence is the intuitive grasp of conventions and distinctions that allows audiences to recognize certain productions as stories, to identify the essential units of those stories, and, with those units in mind, to read, retell, paraphrase, expand, evaluate, and interpret the stories. It means recognizing sequences such as, for example, a rags‐to‐riches plot in different forms: a film, a pantomime, a comic strip, a novel. Narrative competence permits audiences even with widely divergent backgrounds, in dissimilar contexts, to have similar intuitions about stories, and often to agree on basicand even complexrules by which stories operate.
Narrator
Authors: McCormick Paul
Published: July 2017

Narrator refers to the mediating agent through whom an author presents a narrative. To the question, who tells?, the answer is always “the narrator.” (However, there is a minority position that argues for versions of the “no‐narrator theory,” explained later.) But importantly, it is not always the answer to the other key question of narration in a novel, through whose perception do we understand the story? That is a question of point of view or focalization, for the narrator may tell the story not through his or her own perspective, but rather through those of characters in the story's world.
Paper and Print Technology
Authors: Shep Sydney J.
Published: July 2017

Although the novel is often considered a Western genre, South and East Asian literature was populated by many comparable antecedents in print, be theyhistoricalromances, fictional narratives, extended short stories, or hybrid literary forms. In China, the rise of vernacular fiction from the fourteenth century paved the way forHung‐lou‐meng(1791,Dream of the Red Chamber), attributed to Cao Xueqin. Thisdomesticnovel, with its enormous cast of characters and detailed observation of mid‐eighteenth‐century court life, loves, and society, is considered one of China's four great classical novels, along withShuihu zhuan(1614,The Water Margin)andSan‐guoyanyi(1552,Romance of the Three Kingdoms), by Luo Guanzhong, and Xiyou‐ji (1592,Journey to the West), by Wu Cheng'en. It circulated privately in scribal forma common practice‐until 1791, when it was first printed using movable type.
Photography and the Novel
Authors: Novak Daniel A.
Published: July 2017

The invention of photography (literally “light‐writing”) was perhaps the most important revolution in representation for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The development of the Victorian and modern novelindeed, one might say modernity itselfis coterminous with the invention and development of photography and eventually film. As Michael North argues, “the very existence of a modern period, broken away from the time before, is to some extent the creation of photography, which has made all time since the 1840s simultaneously available in a way that makes the years before seem much more remote” (3). For the first time in human history, we were confronted by images made (seemingly) without the intervention of the human hand or human biasan object more like an emanation of the thing itself than a representation. Because of this, the photograph had profound implications for how novelists imagined (and reimagined) the act of writing, depicting, and narrating, as well as how they negotiated the relationship between writer and world. Moreover, this impact was not limited to writers who considered themselves “realists” or even part of a movement like
naturalism
, but rather extended to literary movements that developed in response to
realism
, such as
modernism
and postmodernism. Photography produced a sustained meditation on many of the concerns at the heart of novelistic fiction: point of view, framing, context, representation, identity, desire, and the nature of the human body itself. If one thinks about the most influential texts in the
history
of the novel, from Charlotte Bronte's
Jane Eyre
(1847) and Charles Dickens's
Great Expectations
(1861) to F. Scott Fitzgerald's
The Great Gatsby
(1925) and William Faulkner's
The Sound and the Fury
(1929), so many of them were written in the shadow of photographywhat Nancy Armstrong refers to as “fiction in the age of photography.”
Reader
Authors: Scheffel Michael
Published: July 2017

Generally related to a text‐based literary culture, the term
reader
is connected in academic usage to various concepts of literary criticism and theory. In a narrowly defined sense it is used to refer to (1) the empirical reader, the individual historical recipient of a written or printed text. Thus, taken as a group, empirical readers constitute the author's “public” who, as the final link in the chain of literary communication, also influence the production of literature. Accordingly, the historical figure and reading habits of the empirical reader have been the subject of studies ranging from behavioral and cognitive psychology to the sociology and history of reading. Clearly distinct from the empirical reader is (2) the fictional reader, who belongs to the explicitly imagined world of many literary texts and whose profile and reading habits is a major theme of world literature. Literary criticism and theory use the term
reader
, however, not only to refer to the real or imaginary recipient of a text, but in a broader sense to pinpoint various aspects of writing connected with the addressee. Here the reader is generally a more abstract construct embodying various roles or functions in the process of literary communication; but precise definitions of the concept differ so widely that a consistent typology, let alone a single theory or model covering all usages, is hardly possible. Nevertheless, two concepts can be broadly distinguished: first (3) the fictive reader, understood as the counterpart to the figure of the narrator within the fictional framework, and second (4) the implied reader, a figure of varying profile and indefinable ontological status that functions as the (ideal) conceptual addressee of the text.
Reprints
Authors: McGill Meredith L.
Published: July 2017

Distracted, perhaps, by novels’ own claims to noveltywhat Ian Watt has identified as the form's primary criterion of “truth to individual experience … which is always unique and therefore new” (1957,
The Rise of the Novel
, 13)or by the novel's long association with the news, ephemera, and fashion (see
journalism
), literary critics often fail to account for the role of reprinting in the history of the
genre
. Bibliographers and collectors overwhelmingly privilege first editions, despite the fact that later editions were often more valued by authors, printers, and readers, owing to the correction of errata. (Benjamin Franklin's witty epitaph for himself imagines his body reissued after death “In a new and more elegant Edition/Revised and corrected/By the Author.”) Even Franco Moretti's experimental, quantitative account of the rise and fall of the novel across a number of national traditions measures only the production of new novels, not reprinted ones (2005,
Graphs, Maps, Trees)
. Despite the emphasis critics place on first editions, the small print runs of novels in the 1700s and early 1800s, which James Raven estimates averaged 5007–50 copies, suggest that any novel that gained significant purchase with readers in this period did so by virtue of successive waves of reprinting. Taking reprinting seriously as a factor in the history of the novel can illuminate the cultural life of individual worksboth the pace of a novel's initial acceptance by its readers and the strength and nature of its explanatory power long after the time in which it was written. Reprinting also helps to explain how the fortunes of the genre have been tied to expanded literacy and the demand for cheap reading (see
publishing
). Along with
translation
,
adaptation
, and abridgment, reprinting is one of the primary ways in which publishers target new audiences for novels. Although we have become accustomed to tight control over intellectual property, throughout most of the novel's history the uneven global distribution of intellectual property rights allowed for significant experiments in unauthorized reprinting (see
copyright
), national literary traditions have been more influenced by reprinted foreign novels than nationally framed literary criticism is generally willing to acknowledge.
Reviewing
Authors: Ellis Scott
Published: July 2017

In 1831, the
Edinburgh Review
published “Characteristics,” in which Thomas Carlyle declared: “Nay, is not the diseased self‐conscious state of Literature disclosed in this one fact, which lies so near us here, the prevalence of Reviewing!” Throughout its long history, reviewing has served many different roles, often simultaneously, and whether or not one accepts Carlyle's complaint about it as a diseased state of literary self‐consciousness, reviewing has impacted the writing and reception of the novel from its development in the eighteenth century to the present. Among its many effects, reviewing advertised new books, it served as a medium for partisan and personal attacks and praise, it fostered the shift from patronage to professionalism, it positioned itself as a cultural mediator for morality, and perhaps most importantly, it created a public forum that allowed reviewers to speak about and evaluate literature in general and the novel in particular. This entry will address these aspects of reviewing and examine its impact on novel writing and reading practices over time.
Romance
Authors: Newcomb Lori H.
Published: July 2017

The history of the novel, as the preeminent fiction form of the modern world, is so inextricable from the longer history of romance that most languages except English use a single word for all extended prose fictions. In Spanish that single word is
no‐vela
, but many other languages still draw on the older tradition:
der Roman, le roman, il romanzo
. This entry, treating “romance” in an encyclopedia of the “novel,” necessarily reflects English‐language usage in distinguishing the two. However, it resists an Anglocentric model of fiction history, dominant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that defined “novels” as ambitious, avowedly realist, fictions by modern authors (along with a few precursors), while implying that romances were not just formally distinct but developmentally inferior. Today, genre theorists recognize that the line drawn between novel and romance was and is provisional. Romance, then, includes much of the West's non‐novelistic prose fiction, but not just pre‐novelistic prose fiction, for romance did not become an atavism upon the novel's conception. Romances are written and read today not merely as ancestors of the novel; although often set in a version of the past, they are living kin. The romance space outside novelistic normstimeless and boundless, deliberately conventionalized, idealized, even fantasticremains compelling to writers and audiences.
Russia (20th Century)
Authors: Clowes Edith W.
Published: July 2017

While in the twentieth century English‐language critics proclaimed the death of the novel, in twentieth‐century Russian literary culture this genre enjoyed a dominant position. The novel, as defined by its most famous Russian theorist, Mikhailbakhtin, is a polyphonic genre characterized by the ideological and stylistic counterpoint of multiple “speaking voices,” “centrifugal” and generally freer of the clear “monological” authorial control that the three classicalgenresdisplay. In the 1930s, even as Bakhtin was developing his theory of the novel, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and the eventual dictatorship of Joseph Stalin (1928–53) forced the split of the Russian novel into three sociopolitical avenues of development: the novel in exile, the highly censored officially published “Socialist Realist” novel, and, eventually, the underground novel (later known assamizdat, “writing for the drawer” e.g., self‐publishing). This arrangement continued, though eventually with some loosening, until 1986, when the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, announcedglasnost, or the freedom to express one's opinion publicly.
Serialization
Authors: Okker Patricia , West Nancy
Published: July 2017

For many, the idea of a “novel” conjures up associations with an individual book, an individual reader, an individual pleasure. Neatly contained within its bindings, the novel affords a book lover both private and personal pleasures. She can carry an entire novel wherever she goes, and the very neatness of its containment ensures that she decides when to take a break or when to read voraciously through the night, perhaps with a flashlight in hand to avoid detection.
Sexuality
Authors: Bauer Dale M.
Published: July 2017

Sexuality in novels can refer either to the history of sex (as action or being) appearing in novels or, as literary narratology has proposed, a style of sexuality displayed in novels. Characters either are sexual or act sexually, but one can also argue that plots are charged with sexuality. The difficulty in tracing sexuality in novels depends on whether one considers “sexuality” as a history (the amount of sexuality in novels) or as a theory (the possibilities of sexuality as a political praxis, of repression, or of liberation). For some theorists, sexuality is more of a discipline than a form of liberation. For others, literary sex marks a moment of confusion of normative behavior more than a reaction or rebellion (see Dollimore). Often, sexual battles are played out in novels, such as in the domain of Henry James's
The Portrait of a Lady
(1881), where Isabel Archer debates with herself about conventional marriage and liberal affect.
South
A
sia
Authors: Kanaganayakam Chelva
Published: July 2017

As a category within the larger corpus of postcolonial literature, the South Asian novel has become increasingly significant in the past few decades, particularly in the West. In general terms, the corpus refers to fiction written by all writers whose origins can be traced to South Asia. It would, for instance, include writers from the Caribbean, the Fiji Islands, South Africa, Malaysia, and Singapore who were part of the Indian and Sri Lankan diaspora from the eighteenth to the early part of the twentieth century. Writers such as V. S. Naipaul (Trinidad) and K. S. Maniam (Malaysia), for example, would be considered part of this larger corpus. Apart from the fact that such a classification becomes too unwieldy for critical analysis, it is hardly possible to arrive at anything resembling a conceptual frame while dealing with such multiplicity. For the purpose of the present entry, the term “South Asian” refers to novels written by authors who either live in South Asia or are a part of the recent diaspora from South Asia. While there is a significant body of fiction written in various South Asian languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and so forth, the present entry focuses specifically on novels written in English.
S
outhern
C
one (South
A
merica)
Authors: Austin Kelly
Published: July 2017

Southern Cone narratives have captured the attention of readers around the world partly because of supremely talented writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, Augusto Roa Bastos, Juan Carlos Onetti, and, more recently, Manuel Puig, Diamela Eltit, Luisa Valenzuela, Cristina Peri Rossi, and Roberto Bolaño. Then there is the unique notoriety of the region that inspires musicals, movies, documentaries, and histories about political upheaval. Critics, too, have accorded the Southern Cone novel greater attention than other novels in Latin America, with the exception of the Mexican novel. Popularity has shaped the region's narrative production, and critics have seen to it that these narratives receive special care and scrutiny.
Speech Act Theory
Authors: Emery Kim
Published: July 2017

Speech act theory names a body of thought in which the use of language—a speech act—is conceived as a kind of action within the material world, rather than a description of or a reference to a discrete and exterior reality. Although anticipated in different ways by the works of Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid (1710–96), American pragmatist C. S. Peirce (1839–1914), and German phenomenologists Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and Adolf Reinach (1883–1917), among others, speech act theory is most famously associated with Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin (1911–60). In a series of lectures delivered at Harvard in 1955 and published posthumously in a volume called
How to Do Things with Words
, Austin outlined what has since come to be considered the first systematic elaboration of speech act theory.
Structuralism/Poststructuralism
Authors: Herman David
Published: July 2017

Theorists working under the auspices of both structuralism and poststructuralism have developed ideas of broad relevance for the study of the novel. Although they evolved from a common heritage of concepts—in particular, those associated with Saussurean language theory, with its bipartite analysis of the sign into signifier and signified and its account of language as a system of differences—structuralist and poststructuralist approaches rely on different analytic procedures and set themselves contrasting investigative goals. Notably, whereas structuralism begins from the premise that cultural practices of all sorts are grounded in rule‐systems that are subject to conscious scrutiny as well as unconscious mastery, poststructuralism is a version of antifoundationalism, i.e., skepticism concerning the existence (or accessibility) of ultimate foundations for knowledge, bedrock truths that subtend and guarantee the process of interpretation (Singer and Rockmore).