genre; and various subspecies of the novel, such as the gothic and the picaresque, are themselves frequently treated as distinct genres. Finally, the term “genre fiction” refers to forms of popular fiction in which the writer is bound by more or less rigid conventions. Indeed, all these diverse usages have in common an emphasis on the manner in
which individual literary works are shaped by particular expectations and conven-
tions; this is the subject of genre criticism.
genre fiction: Categories of popular fiction in which the writers are bound by more or less rigid conventions, such as in the detective story, the romance, and the Western. Although the term can be used in a neutral sense, it is often used dismissively.
gothic novel: A form of fiction developed in the eighteenth century that focuses on horror and the supernatural. In his preface to The Castle of Otranto (1765), the first gothic novel in English, Horace Walpole claimed that he was trying to combine two kinds of
fiction, with events and story typical of the medieval romance and character delinea-
tion typical of the realistic novel. Other examples of the form are Matthew Gregory
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Lewis’s The Monk: A Romance (1796; also known as Ambrosio: Or, The Monk) and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus (1818).
grotesque: According to Wolfgang Kayser ( The Grotesque in Art and Literature, 1963), the grotesque is an embodiment in literature of the estranged world. Characterized by a
breakup of the everyday world by mysterious forces, the form differs from fantasy in that the reader is not sure whether to react with humor or with horror and in that the exaggeration manifested exists in the familiar world rather than in a purely imaginative world.
Hebraic/Homeric styles: Terms coined by Erich Auerbach in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953) to designate two basic fictional styles. The Hebraic style focuses only on the decisive points of narrative and leaves all else obscure, mysterious, and “fraught with background”; the Homeric style places the narra-
tive in a definite time and place and externalizes everything in a perpetual foreground.
historical criticism: In contrast to formalist criticism, which treats literary works to a great extent as self-contained artifacts, historical criticism emphasizes the historical context of literature; the two approaches, however, need not be mutually exclusive. Ernst Robert Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1940) is a prominent example of historical criticism.
historical novel: A novel that depicts past historical events, usually public in nature, and features real as well as fictional people. Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels established the basic type, but the relationship between fiction and history in the form varies
greatly depending on the practitioner.
implied author: According to Wayne Booth ( The Rhetoric of Fiction, 1961), the novel often creates a kind of second self who tells the story—a self who is wiser, more sensi-
tive, and more perceptive than any real person could be.
interior monologue: Defined by Édouard Dujardin as the speech of a character designed to introduce the reader directly to the character’s internal life, the form differs from other kinds of monologue in that it attempts to reproduce thought before any logical
organization is imposed on it. See, for example, Molly Bloom’s long interior mono-
logue at the conclusion of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).
irrealism: A term often used to refer to modern or postmodern fiction that is presented self-consciously as a fiction or a fabulation rather than a mimesis of external reality.
The best-known practitioners of irrealism are John Barth, Robert Coover, and Donald
Barthelme.
local colorists: A loose movement of late nineteenth century American writers whose fiction emphasizes the distinctive folkways, landscapes, and dialects of various regions.
Important local colorists include Bret Harte, Mark Twain, George Washington Cable,
Kate Chopin, and Sarah Orne Jewett. (See regional novel.)
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Marxist criticism: Based on the nineteenth century writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marxist criticism views literature as a product of ideological forces determined by the dominant class. However, many Marxists believe that literature operates
according to its own autonomous standards of production and reception: It is both a
product of ideology and able to determine ideology. As such, literature may overcome
the dominant paradigms of its age and play a revolutionary role in society.
metafiction: This term refers to fiction that manifests a reflexive tendency, such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). The emphasis is on the loosening of the work’s illusion of reality to expose the reality of its illusion. Other terms used to refer to this type of fiction include
“irrealism,” “postmodernist fiction,” “antifiction,” and “surfiction.”
modernism: An international movement in the arts that began in the early years of the twentieth century. Although the term is used to describe artists of widely varying persuasions, modernism in general was characterized by its international idiom, by its in-
terest in cultures distant in space or time, by its emphasis on formal experimentation,
and by its sense of dislocation and radical change.
motif: A conventional incident or situation in a fiction that may serve as the basis for the structure of the narrative itself. The Russian Formalist critic Boris Tomashevsky uses
the term to refer to the smallest particle of thematic material in a work.
motivation: Although this term is usually used in reference to the convention of justifying the action of a character from his or her psychological makeup, the Russian Formalists
use the term to refer to the network of devices that justify the introduction of individual motifs or groups of motifs in a work. For example, “compositional motivation” refers to the principle that every single property in a work contributes to its overall effect; “realistic motivation” refers to the realistic devices used to make a work plausible and
lifelike.
multiculturalism: The tendency to recognize the perspectives of those traditionally excluded from the canon of Western art and literature. In order to promote multicultural-
ism, publishers and educators have revised textbooks and school curricula to incorpo-
rate material by and about women, members of minority groups, persons from non-
Western cultures, and homosexuals.
myth: Anonymous traditional stories dealing with basic human concepts and antinomies.
According to Claude Lévi-Strauss, myth is that part of language where the “formula
tradutore, tradittore reaches its lowest truth value. . . . Its substance does not lie in its style, its original music, or its syntax, but in the story which it tells.”
myth criticism: Northrop Frye says that in myth “we see the structural principles of literature isolated.” Myth criticism is concerned with these basic principles of literature; it is not to be confused with mythological criticism, which is primarily concerned with
finding mythological parallels in the surface action of the narrative.
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narrative: Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, in The Nature of Narrative (1966), say that by “narrative” they mean literary works that include both a story and a storyteller. The term “narrative” usually implies a contrast to “enacted” fiction such as drama.
narratology: The study of the form and functioning of narratives; it attempts to examine what al
l narratives have in common and what makes individual narratives different
from one another.
narrator: The character who recounts the narrative, or story. Wayne Booth describes various dramatized narrators in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961): unacknowledged centers of consciousness, observers, narrator-agents, and self-conscious narrators. Booth suggests that the important elements to consider in narration are the relationships among
the narrator, the author, the characters, and the reader.
naturalism: As developed by Émile Zola in the late nineteenth century, naturalism is the application of the principles of scientific determinism to fiction. Although it usually refers more to the choice of subject matter than to technical conventions, those conven-
tions associated with the movement center on the author’s attempt to be precise and
scientifically objective in description and detail, regardless of whether the events
described are sordid or shocking.
New Criticism: See formalist criticism.
novel: Perhaps the most difficult of all fictional forms to define because of its multiplicity of modes. Edouard, in André Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs (1925; The Counterfeiters, 1927), says the novel is the freest and most lawless of all genres; he wonders if fear of that liberty is the reason the novel has so timidly clung to reality. Most critics seem to agree that the novel’s primary area of concern is the social world. Ian Watt ( The Rise of the Novel, 2001) says that the novel can be distinguished from other fictional forms by the attention it pays to individual characterization and detailed presentation of the environment. Moreover, says Watt, the novel, more than any other fictional form, is inter-
ested in the “development of its characters in the course of time.”
novel of manners: The classic examples of this form might be the novels of Jane Austen, wherein the customs and conventions of a social group of a particular time and place
are realistically, and often satirically, portrayed.
novella, novelle, nouvelle, novelette, novela: Although these terms often refer to the short European tale, especially the Renaissance form employed by Giovanni Boccaccio, the
terms often refer to that form of fiction that is said to be longer than a short story and shorter than a novel. “Novelette” is the term usually preferred by the British, whereas
“novella” is the term usually used to refer to American works in this genre. Henry James claimed that the main merit of the form is the “effort to do the complicated thing with a strong brevity and lucidity.”
phenomenological criticism: Although best known as a European school of criticism practiced by Georges Poulet and others, this so-called criticism of consciousness is
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also propounded in the United States by such critics as J. Hillis Miller. The focus is less on individual works and genres than it is on literature as an act; the work is not seen as an object but rather as part of a strand of latent impulses in the work of a single author or an epoch.
picaresque novel: A form of fiction that centers on a central rogue figure, or picaro, who usually tells his or her own story. The plot structure is normally episodic, and the episodes usually focus on how the picaro lives by his or her wits. Classic examples of the
mode are Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749; commonly
known as Tom Jones) and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).
plot/story: “Story” refers to the full narrative of character and action, whereas “plot” generally refers to action with little reference to character. A more precise and helpful distinction is made by the Russian Formalists, who suggest that “plot” refers to the events of a narrative as they have been artfully arranged in the literary work, subject to chronological displacement, ellipses, and other devices, while “story” refers to the sum of
the same events arranged in simple, causal-chronological order. Thus story is the raw
material for plot. By comparing the two in a given work, the reader is encouraged to see the narrative as an artifact.
point of view: The means by which the story is presented to the reader, or, as Percy Lubbock says in The Craft of Fiction (1921), “the relation in which the narrator stands to the story”—a relation that Lubbock claims governs the craft of fiction. Some of the
questions the critical reader should ask concerning point of view are the following:
Who talks to the reader? From what position does the narrator tell the story? At what
distance does he or she place the reader from the story? What kind of person is he or
she? How fully is he or she characterized? How reliable is he or she? For further dis-
cussion, see Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961).
postcolonialism: Postcolonial literature emerged in the mid-twentieth century when colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean began gaining their independence from the Eu-
ropean nations that had long controlled them. Postcolonial authors, such as Salman
Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul, tend to focus on both the freedom and the conflict inherent
in living in a postcolonial state.
postmodernism: A ubiquitous but elusive term in contemporary criticism, “postmodernism” is loosely applied to the various artistic movements that followed the era of so-
called high modernism, represented by such giants as James Joyce and Pablo Picasso.
In critical discussions of contemporary fiction, the term “postmodernism” is fre-
quently applied to the works of writers such as Thomas Pynchon, John Barth,
and Donald Barthelme, who exhibit a self-conscious awareness of their modernist pre-
decessors as well as a reflexive treatment of fictional form.
protagonist: The central character in a fiction, the character whose fortunes most concern the reader.
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impacts of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, and other psychological theo-
rists, the term “psychological criticism” suggests a strong emphasis on a causal rela-
tion between the writer’s psychological state, variously interpreted, and his or her
works. A notable example of psychological criticism is Norman Fruman’s Coleridge,
the Damaged Archangel (1971).
psychological novel: A form of fiction in which character, especially the inner lives of characters, is the primary focus. This form, which has been of primary importance at
least since Henry James, characterizes much of the work of James Joyce, Virginia
Woolf, and William Faulkner. For a detailed discussion, see The Modern Psychologi-
cal Novel (1955) by Leon Edel.
realism: A literary technique in which the primary convention is to render an illusion of fidelity to external reality. Realism is often identified as the primary method of the novel form: It focuses on surface details, maintains a fidelity to the everyday experiences of middle-class society, and strives for a one-to-one relationship between the fiction and
the action imitated. The realist movement in the late nineteenth century coincides with
the full development of the novel form.
reception aesthetics: The best-known American practitioner of reception aesthetics is Stanley Fish. For the reception critic, meaning is an event or process; rather than being embedded in the work, it is created through particular acts of reading. The best-known
European practitioner of this criticism, Wolfgang Iser, argues that indeterminacy is the basic characteristic of literary texts; the reader must “normalize” the text either by projecting his or her standards into it or by revising his or her standards to “fit” the text.
re
gional novel: Any novel in which the character of a given geographical region plays a decisive role. Although regional differences persist across the United States, a considerable leveling in speech and customs has taken place, so that the sharp regional dis-
tinctions evident in nineteenth century American fiction have all but disappeared.
Only in the South has a strong regional tradition persisted to the present. (See local colorists.)
rhetorical criticism: The rhetorical critic is concerned with the literary work as a means of communicating ideas and the means by which the work affects or controls the reader.
Such criticism seems best suited to didactic works such as satire.
roman à clef: A fiction wherein actual people, often celebrities of some sort, are thinly disguised.
romance: The romance usually differs from the novel form in that the focus is on symbolic events and representational characters rather than on “as-if-real” characters and
events. Richard Chase says that in the romance, character is depicted as highly styl-
ized, a function of the plot rather than as someone complexly related to society. The romancer is more likely to be concerned with dreamworlds than with the familiar world,
believing that reality cannot be grasped by the traditional novel.
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Romanticism: A widespread cultural movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the influence of which is still felt. As a general literary tendency, Romanticism is frequently contrasted with classicism. Although many varieties of Romanticism are indigenous to various national literatures, the term generally suggests
an assertion of the preeminence of the imagination. Other values associated with vari-
ous schools of Romanticism include primitivism, an interest in folklore, a reverence
for nature, and a fascination with the demoniac and the macabre.
scene: The central element of narration; specific actions are narrated or depicted that make the reader feel he or she is participating directly in the action.
science fiction: Fiction in which certain givens (physical laws, psychological principles, social conditions—any one or all of these) form the basis of an imaginative projection
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