A Criminology Of Narrative Fiction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rafe McGregor
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Fiction

The Language of Flowers in the Victorian Knowledge Age

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Molly Engelhardt
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
Knowledge Age

The language of flowers is typically dismissed as a subgenre of botany books that, while popular, had little if any influence on the material culture of Victorian life. This article challenges this assumption by situating the genre within the context of the professionalisation of botany at mid-century to show how efforts to change attitudes towards botany from a fashionable pastime for the gentler sex to a utilitarian practice in service of humanity contributed to the revitalisation and popularity of the language of flowers. While scientific botanists sought to know flowers physiologically and morphologically in the spirit of progress and truth, practitioners of the language of flowers – written primarily for and by women – celebrated uncertainty and relied on floral codes to curtail knowing in order to extend the realm of play. The struggle for floral authority was centred in botanical discourses – both scientific and amateur – but extended as well into narrative fiction. Turning to works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, I show how Victorian writers expected a certain degree of floral literacy from their readers and used floral codes strategically in their fiction as subtexts for practitioners of the language of flowers. These three writers, I argue, took a stand in the gender struggle over floral authority by creating scientific botanists who are so obsessed with dissecting plants to reveal their secrets and know their ‘life truths’ that they become farsighted in matters of romantic love and unable to read the most obvious and surface of floral codes. The consequences of the dismissal of the superficial are in some cases quite disastrous.

The Riddle of the Sands

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Brayton
Keyword(s):  
Coastal Zone ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Intertidal Zone ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
Aesthetic Appeal ◽  
Secret Service ◽  
German Coast ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Modern Nation State

The aesthetic appeal of coasts is due in part to the indeterminacy of the intertidal zone. The imagination finds room to play where land and sea meet. This chapter explores the coastal zone that lies at the heart of a novel considered by many to be the first modern spy thriller, Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service. Childers develops the notion of coastal indeterminacy as a figure for the boundaries, ambitions, and limitations of the modern nation-state. The journey of Childers’s characters through a north Atlantic archipelago that extends from the German coast draws a line of association between Europe and Britain, whose form depends on coastlines, estuaries, and shallows. In following this course, Childers creates a narrative fiction that shifts between charts, borders, and languages.

The Ontological Work of Genre and Place: Wuthering Heights and the Case of the Occulted Landscape

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-138
Author(s):  
Lauren M. E. Goodlad
Keyword(s):  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Trade Flows ◽  
Uneven Development ◽  
Sense Making ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Wuthering Heights ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
History Of ◽  
Atlantic Slavery

This essay shows how genre and place enable the “ontological reading” of narrative fiction. Such sense-making dialectics enable readers to infer the terms of existence that shape fictional worlds. World-systems thinkers have theorized the critical premise of material worlds shaped though ongoing processes of combined and uneven development. Ontological reading is a comparative practice for studying the narrative work of “figuring out” those processes—for example, through the “occulted landscapes” of Yorkshire noir. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights () can be likened to a species of crime fiction in prefiguring the “hardboiled” pull from epistemological certainty to ontological complication. Whereas David Peace's millennial Red Riding series of novels and films palimpsestically layers multiple pasts and presents, Wuthering Heights’ photomontage-like landscape airbrushes the seams of combined and uneven histories. Both narratives evoke moorland terrains conducive to a long history of woolens manufacturing reliant on the energized capital and trade flows of Atlantic slavery. Both works body forth occulted landscapes with the capacity to narrate widely: their troubling of ontological difference—between human and animal, life and death, past and present, nature and supernature—lays the ground for generically flexile stories of regional becoming. Ontological reading thus widens literary study.

Grammatik der Narration

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-494
Author(s):  
Sonja Zeman
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Discourse ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
Second Step ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
The Status ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Narrative Syntax

AbstractIs there a ‚narrative syntax‘, i. e. a special grammar restricted to narrative fiction? Starting from this question which has been investigated since early structuralism, the paper focusses on grammatical characteristics of narrative discourse mode and their implications for a linguistic theory of narration. Its goal is two-fold: In a first step, the traditional accounts by Benveniste, Hamburger, Kuroda and recent typological studies are brought together in order to support the claim that the distinction between narrative and non-narrative discourse mode is a fundamental one that has consequences for the use of grammar. In a second step, I discuss three central questions within the intersection between narrative micro- and macro-structures, namely (i) the definition of narrativity, (ii) the status of the narrator, and (iii) the relation between narration and fictionality. In sum, the article argues that investigations on the ‘grammar of narration’ do not just offer insights into a specific text configuration next to others, but are deeply linked to fundamental theoretical questions concerning the architecture of language – and that the comparison between linguistic and narratological categories offers a potential for addressing them.

The Negotiation of Literary Dialogue in Translation

Target ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Assis Rosa
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
Power Relation ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
European Portuguese ◽  
Pragmatic Dimension ◽  
The Way

Abstract Focussing on the pragmatic dimension of literary dialogue in narrative fiction, this paper analyses: (a) the negotiation of power carried out by characters and the way it is relayed in the text as signalled by forms of address; and (b) the negotiation performed by the translator in order to reproduce a power relation when dealing with the cultural and social environments of the source- and the target-language texts. By analysing one hundred years of Robinson Crusoe translated into European Portuguese (189– to 1992) the paper will attempt to reveal a possible historical development of translational norms and the way in which the historical, cultural and social environments may have influenced them.

In the eye of the recipient

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrin Riese ◽  
Mareike Bayer ◽  
Gerhard Lauer ◽  
Annekathrin Schacht
Keyword(s):  
Pupil Diameter ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
Data Analyses ◽  
Different Dimensions ◽  
Literary Classics ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Physiological Indicator ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Cognitive Dimensions

Plot suspense is one of the most important components of narrative fiction that motivate recipients to follow fictional characters through their worlds. The present study investigates the dynamic development of narrative suspense in excerpts of literary classics from the 19th century in a multi-methodological approach. For two texts, differing in suspense as judged by a large independent sample, we collected (a) data from questionnaires, indicating different affective and cognitive dimensions of receptive engagement, (b) continuous ratings of suspense during text reception from both experts and lay recipients, and (c) registration of pupil diameter as a physiological indicator of changes in emotional arousal and attention during reception. Data analyses confirmed differences between the two texts at different dimensions of receptive engagement and, importantly, revealed significant correlations of pupil diameter and the course of suspense over time. Our findings demonstrate that changes of the pupil diameter provide a reliable ‘online’ indicator of suspense.

Dead Enough to Bury

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-44
Author(s):  
Russell Smith
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Fiction

Abstract This essay examines the concepts of life and afterlife as they appear across Beckett’s trilogy, through focussing on representations of the act of burial, an act which draws attention to a caesura between biotic and abiotic conceptions of both life and afterlife. As the worlds of the trilogy become progressively less biotic, The Unnamable might be thought of as a laboratory in which the ‘lives’ of its characters are subjected to various biological experiments, experiments which suggest that narrative fiction, like the act of burial, is a kind of prophylactic against the fundamental processual nature of biotic life.

Systematizing evil in literature: twelve models for the analysis of narrative fiction

Semiotica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Candel
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Factor Model ◽  
Five Factor Model ◽  
Dark Triad ◽  
Natural Evil ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
The Third ◽  
Nature And Society ◽  
Systematic Collection

Abstract While there are interesting connections between literature and evil, there is as of yet no systematic collection of models of evil to study literature. This is problematic, since literature is among other things an evaluative discourse and the most basic evaluative category is the polarity of good versus evil. In addition, evil shows important affinities with basic narratological principles. To initiate a discussion of models of evil for the analysis of literature, this article organizes a dozen models of evil into four groups. The first consists of a core model which coincides with basic narratological elements in character analysis and narrative tension. The second group contains two pre-modern models of evil, defilement and moral-natural evil. The third group takes its cue from personality theory and proposes the five-factor model of personality and an enriched “dark triad,” and, to balance description against narration, a model which categorizes kinds of murder. The last group organizes six models around the thematic opposition between nature and society, an opposition which forms the backbone of Western philosophy and narrative. To test their validity, the models are applied to a series of literary examples/characters, above all Grendel (Beowulf), Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” and Carol Oates’ short story “Heat.”

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