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roots from Europe through Latin America to other regions of the world. Explores the
political dimensions of the genre.
Hoffman, Michael J., and Patrick D. Murphy, eds. Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. 2d ed. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. Collection of essays by influential
critics from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century. Focuses on the
essential elements of fiction and the novel’s relationship to the world it depicts.
Lodge, David. The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts. New York: Viking Press, 1993. Short commentaries on the technical aspects of fiction. Examples
from important and minor novelists illustrate literary principles and techniques such as point of view, suspense, character introduction, irony, motivation, and ending.
Lynch, Deirdre, and William B. Walker, eds. Cultural Institutions of the Novel. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. Fifteen essays examine aspects of long fiction produced around the world. Encourages a redefinition of the genre and argues for inclu-
sion of texts not historically considered novels.
Moretti, Franco, ed. The Novel. 2 vols. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Compendium exploring the novel from multiple perspectives, including as an anthro-
pological, historical, and sociological document; a function of the national tradition
from which it emerges; and a work of art subject to examination using various critical
approaches.
Priestman, Martin, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2003. Essays examine the nature and development of the
genre, explore works by writers (including women and ethnic minorities) from several
countries, and establish links between crime fiction and other literary genres. Includes a chronology.
Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2005. Provides a history of crime fiction, explores key subgenres, and identifies recurring themes that suggest the wider so-
cial and historical context in which these works are written. Suggests critical ap-
proaches that open crime fiction to serious study.
Shiach, Morag, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Essays explaining the concept of modernism and its in-
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fluence on the novel. Detailed examination of works by writers from various countries,
all influenced by the modernist movement. Includes a detailed chronology.
Vice, Sue. Holocaust Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2000. Examines controversies generated by novels about the Holocaust. Focuses on eight important works, but also of-
fers observations on the polemics surrounding publication of books on this topic.
Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. Applies theories of cognitive psychology to novel reading, explaining how experience and human nature lead readers to constrain their inter-
pretations of a given text. Provides numerous examples from well-known novels to il-
lustrate how and why readers find pleasure in fiction.
Laurence W. Mazzeno
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Glossary of Literary Terms
absurdism: A philosophical attitude, pervading much of modern drama and fiction, that underlines the isolation and alienation that humans experience, having been thrown
into what absurdists see as a godless universe devoid of religious, spiritual, or meta-
physical meaning. Conspicuous in its lack of logic, consistency, coherence, intelligi-
bility, and realism, the literature of the absurd depicts the anguish, forlornness, and despair inherent in the human condition. Counter to the rationalist assumptions of
traditional humanism, absurdism denies the existence of universal truth or value.
allegory: A literary mode in which a second level of meaning, wherein characters, events, and settings represent abstractions, is encoded within the surface narrative. The allegorical mode may dominate an entire work, in which case the encoded message is the
work’s primary reason for being, or it may be an element in a work otherwise interest-
ing and meaningful for its surface story alone. Elements of allegory may be found in
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg
(1924; The Magic Mountain, 1927).
anatomy: Literally the term means the “cutting up” or “dissection” of a subject into its constituent parts for closer examination. Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), uses the term to refer to a narrative that deals with mental attitudes rather than people. As opposed to the novel, the anatomy features stylized figures who are mouth-pieces for the ideas they represent.
antagonist: The character in fiction who stands as a rival or opponent to the protagonist.
antihero: Defined by Seán O’Faoláin as a fictional figure who, deprived of social sanc-tions and definitions, is always trying to define himself and to establish his own codes.
Ahab may be seen as the antihero of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851).
archetype: The term “archetype” entered literary criticism from the psychology of Carl Jung, who defined archetypes as “primordial images” from the “collective unconscious” of humankind. Jung believed that works of art derive much of their power from
the unconscious appeal of these images to ancestral memories. In his extremely influ-
ential Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye gave another sense of the term wide currency, defining the archetype as “a symbol, usually an image, which recurs often
enough in literature to be recognizable as an element of one’s literary experience as a
whole.”
atmosphere: The general mood or tone of a work; atmosphere is often associated with setting but can also be established by action or dialogue. A classic example of atmosphere
is the primitive, fatalistic tone created in the opening description of Egdon Heath in
Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878).
bildungsroman: Sometimes called the “novel of education,” the bildungsroman focuses on the growth of a young protagonist who is learning about the world and finding his or her place in life; typical examples are James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a 270
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Glossary of Literary Terms
Young Man (1914-1915, serial; 1916, book) and Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward,
Angel (1929).
biographical criticism: Criticism that attempts to determine how the events and experiences of an author’s life influence his or her work.
bourgeois novel: A novel in which the values, preoccupations, and accoutrements of middle-class or bourgeois life are given particular prominence. The heyday of the bour-
geois novel was the nineteenth century, when novelists as varied as Jane Austen,
Honoré de Balzac, and Anthony Trollope both criticized and unreflectingly transmit-
ted the assumptions of the rising middle class.
canon: An authorized or accepted list of books. In modern parlance, the literary canon comprehends the privileged texts, classics, or great books that are thought to belong
permanently on university reading lists. Recent theory—especially feminist, Marxist,
and poststructuralist—critically examines the process of canon formation and ques-
tions the hegemony of white male writers. Such theory sees canon formation as the
ideological act of a dominant institution and seeks to undermine the notion of
canonicity itself, thereby preventing the exclusion of works by women, minorities, and
oppressed peoples.
character: Characters in
fiction can be presented as if they were real people or as stylized functions of the plot. Usually characters are a combination of both factors.
classicism: A literary stance or value system consciously based on the example of classical Greek and Roman literature. While the term is applied to an enormous diversity of
artists in many different periods and in many different national literatures, “classi-
cism” generally denotes a cluster of values including formal discipline, restrained ex-
pression, reverence for tradition, and an objective rather than a subjective orientation.
As a literary tendency, classicism is often opposed to Romanticism, although many writers combine classical and romantic elements.
climax/crisis: The term “climax” refers to the moment of the reader’s highest emotional response, whereas “crisis” refers to a structural element of plot, a turning point at
which a resolution must take place.
complication: The point in a novel when the conflict is developed or when the already existing conflict is further intensified.
conflict: The struggle that develops as a result of the opposition between the protagonist and another person, the natural world, society, or some force within the self.
contextualist criticism: A further extension of formalist criticism, which assumes that the language of art is constitutive. Rather than referring to preexistent values, the artwork creates values only inchoately realized before. The most important advocates of this
position are Eliseo Vivas ( The Artistic Transaction, 1963) and Murray Krieger ( The Play and Place of Criticism, 1967).
conventions: All those devices of stylization, compression, and selection that constitute 271
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Critical Survey of Long Fiction
the necessary differences between art and life. According to the Russian Formalists,
these conventions constitute the “literariness” of literature and are the only proper concern of the literary critic.
deconstruction: An extremely influential contemporary school of criticism based on the works of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Deconstruction treats literary works
as unconscious reflections of the reigning myths of Western culture. The primary myth
is that there is a meaningful world that language signifies or represents. The decon-
structionist critic is most often concerned with showing how a literary text tacitly subverts the very assumptions or myths on which it ostensibly rests.
defamiliarization: Coined by Viktor Shklovsky in 1917, this term denotes a basic principle of Russian Formalism. Poetic language (by which the Formalists meant artful lan-
guage, in prose as well as in poetry) defamiliarizes or “makes strange” familiar experi-
ences. The technique of art, says Shklovsky, is to “make objects unfamiliar, to make
forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception. . . . Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.”
detective story: The so-called classic detective story (or mystery) is a highly formalized and logically structured mode of fiction in which the focus is on a crime solved by a detective through interpretation of evidence and ratiocination; the most famous detective
in this mode is Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Many modern practitioners of
the genre, however, such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Mac-
donald, have de-emphasized the puzzlelike qualities of the detective story, stressing instead characterization, theme, and other elements of mainstream fiction.
determinism: The belief that an individual’s actions are essentially determined by biological and environmental factors, with free will playing a negligible role. (See naturalism.)
dialogue: The similitude of conversation in fiction, dialogue serves to characterize, to further the plot, to establish conflict, and to express thematic ideas.
displacement: Popularized in criticism by Northrop Frye, this term refers to the author’s attempt to make his or her story psychologically motivated and realistic, even as the la-
tent structure of the mythical motivation moves relentlessly forward.
dominant: A term coined by Roman Jakobson to refer to that which “rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components in the work of a single artist, in a poetic
canon, or in the work of an epoch.” The shifting of the dominant in a genre accounts for the creation of new generic forms and new poetic epochs. For example, the rise of realism in the mid-nineteenth century indicates realistic conventions becoming dominant and romance or fantasy conventions becoming secondary.
doppelgänger: A double or counterpart of a person, sometimes endowed with ghostly qualities. A fictional character’s doppelgänger often reflects a suppressed side of his or her personality. One of the classic examples of the doppelgänger motif is found in
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Fyodor Dostoevski’s novella Dvoynik (1846; The Double, 1917); Isaac Bashevis Singer and Jorge Luis Borges, among others, offer striking modern treatments of the
doppelgänger.
epic: Although this term usually refers to a long narrative poem that presents the exploits of a central figure of high position, the term is also used to designate a long novel that has the style or structure usually associated with an epic. In this sense, for example,
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) may be called epics.
episodic narrative: A work that is held together primarily by a loose connection of self-sufficient episodes. Picaresque novels often have episodic structure.
epistolary novel: A novel made up of letters by one or more fictional characters. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740-1741) is a well-known eighteenth
century example. In the nineteenth century, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is largely epistolary. The technique allows for several different points of view to be presented.
euphuism: A style of writing characterized by ornate language that is highly contrived, al-literative, and repetitious. Euphuism was developed by John Lyly in his Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit (1578) and was emulated frequently by writers of the Elizabethan Age.
existentialism: A philosophical, religious, and literary term, emerging from World War II, for a group of attitudes surrounding the pivotal notion that existence precedes essence.
According to Jean-Paul Sartre, “Man is nothing else but what he makes himself.” For-
lornness arises from the death of God and the concomitant death of universal values, of
any source of ultimate or a priori standards. Despair arises from the fact that an individual can reckon only with what depends on his or her will, and the sphere of that will is severely limited; the number of things on which he or she can have an impact is pathetically small. Existentialist literature is antideterministic in the extreme and rejects the idea that heredity and environment shape and determine human motivation and
behavior.
exposition: The part or parts of a fiction that provide necessary background information.
Exposition not only provides the time and place of the action but also introduces read-
ers to the fictive world of the story, acquainting them with the ground rules of the work.
fantastic: In his study The Fantastic (1970), Tzvetan Todorov defines the fantastic as a genre that lies between the “uncanny” and the “marvelous.” All three genres embody the familiar world but present an event that cannot be explained by the laws of the familiar world. Todorov says that the fantastic occupies a twilight zone between the un-
canny (when the reader knows that the peculiar event is merely the result of an illusion) and the marvelous (when the reader understands that the event is supposed to take
place in a realm controlled by
laws unknown to humankind). The fantastic is thus es-
sentially unsettling, provocative, even subversive.
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feminist criticism: A criticism advocating equal rights for women in political, economic, social, psychological, personal, and aesthetic senses. On the thematic level, the feminist reader should identify with female characters and their concerns. The object is to
provide a critique of phallocentric assumptions and an analysis of patriarchal ideolo-
gies inscribed in a literature that is male-centered and male-dominated. On the ideo-
logical level, feminist critics see gender, as well as the stereotypes that go along with it, as a cultural construct. They strive to define a particularly feminine content and to extend the canon so that it might include works by lesbians, feminists, and women writers in general.
flashback: A scene in a fiction that depicts an earlier event; it may be presented as a reminiscence by a character in the story or may simply be inserted into the narrative.
foreshadowing: A device to create suspense or dramatic irony in fiction by indicating through suggestion what will take place in the future.
formalist criticism: Two particularly influential formalist schools of criticism arose in the twentieth century: the Russian Formalists and the American New Critics. The Russian
Formalists were concerned with the conventional devices used in literature to defa-
miliarize that which habit has made familiar. The New Critics believed that literary
criticism is a description and evaluation of its object and that the primary concern of
the critic is with the work’s unity. Both schools of criticism, at their most extreme,
treated literary works as artifacts or constructs divorced from their biographical and
social contexts.
genre: In its most general sense, this term refers to a group of literary works defined by a common form, style, or purpose. In practice, the term is used in a wide variety of overlapping and, to a degree, contradictory senses. Tragedy and comedy are thus described
as distinct genres; the novel (a form that includes both tragic and comic works) is a