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How did nineteenth-century poets negotiate the complex interplay between two seemingly antithetical modes--lyric and narrative? Narrative Means, Lyric Ends examines the solutions offered by four canonical long poems: William Wordsworth's The Prelude, Lord Byron's Don Juan, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, and Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book. Monique Morgan argues that each of these texts uses narrative techniques to create lyrical effects, effects that manipulate readers' experience of time and shape their intellectual, emotional, and ethical responses. To highlight the productive tension between the modes, Morgan defines narrative as essentially temporal and sequential, and lyric as creating an illusion of simultaneity. The poems reinforce their larger narrative strategies, she suggests, with their figurative language. Through her readings of these texts, Morgan questions lyric's brevity and associability, interrogates retrospection's importance for narrative, examines the gendered implications of several genres, and determines the dramatic monologue's temporal structure. Narrative Means, Lyric Ends offers four case studies of the interactions between broad modes and among specific genres, changes our aesthetic and ideological assumptions about lyric and narrative, expands the domain of narratology, and advocates a renewed formalism.
This pathbreaking work uses the approaching conclusion of the second millennium as a context for discussing questions concerning temporal division and narrative continuity. It investigates assumptions about teleology and eschatology while exploring the ways in which temporal division affects the creation and production of cultural texts and, reciprocally, the ways in which narrative techniques, forms, and conventions shape, explain, and justify history. Through this exploration, the volume examines how temporal thresholds tend simultaneously to reinforce and to disrupt conceptual boundaries. The sixteen essays use the significance typically invested in historical junctures marked by a centenary advance to investigate perceived paradigm shifts and the consequent reactions to these implicit and explicit transitions. By doing so, they also seek to illuminate the relations between narrative and history, and to enhance understanding of our present historical moment.
Lyrical Strategies advances the highly original idea that not all literary fiction should be read as a novel. Instead, Katie Owens-Murphy identifies a prominent type of American novel well suited to the reading methods of lyric poetry and exhibiting lyric frameworks of structural repetition, rhythm, figurative meaning, dramatic personae, and exclusive address. Owens-Murphy surveys a broad array of writers: poets from the lyrical transatlantic tradition, as well as American novelists including Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Cormac McCarthy. Through a masterful reexamination of canonical works of twentieth-century American fiction through the lens of lyric poetry, she reveals how many elements in these novels can be better understood as poetic and rhetorical figures (metaphysical conceit, polysyndeton, dramatic monologue, apostrophe, and so on) than as narrative ones. Making fresh contributions to literary theory and American fiction, Lyrical Strategies will fascinate readers and scholars of the American novel, fiction, poetry, and poetics alike.
The present age has seen an explosion of verse novels in many parts of the world. Australia is a prolific producer, as are the USA and the UK. Novels in verse have also appeared in Canada, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Jamaica and several other countries. A novel written in verse contradicts theories that distinguish the novel as essentially a prose genre. The boundaries of prose and verse are, however, somewhat fluid. This is especially evident in the case of free verse poetry and the kinds of prose used in many Modernist novels. The contemporary outburst may seem a uniquely Postmodernist flouting of generic boundaries, but, in fact, the verse novel is not new. Its origins reach back to at least the eighteenth century. Byron’s Don Juan, in the early nineteenth century, was an important influence on many later examples. Since its first surge in popularity during the Victorian era, it has never died out, though some fine examples, most of them from the earlier twentieth century, have been neglected or forgotten. This book investigates the status of the verse novel as a genre and traces its mainly English-language history from its beginnings. The discussion will be of interest to genre theorists, prosodists, narratologists and literary historians, as well as readers of verse novels wishing for some background to this apparently new literary phenomenon.
This book is a study of nineteenth-century poems that remember, yearn for, fixate on, and forget the past. Reflecting the current critical drive to reconcile formalist and historicist approaches to literature, it uses close readings to trace the complex interactions between memory as a theme and the (often-memorable) formal traits – such as brevity, stanzaic structure, and sonic repetition – that appear in the lyrics examined. This book considers the interwoven nature of remembering and forgetting in the work of four Victorian poets. It uses this theme to shed new light on the relationship between lyric and narrative, on the connections between gender and genre, and on the way in which Victorians represented and commemorated the past.
This Companion offers an engaging and accessible introduction to key concepts in the study of poetry and poetics.
Narrative theory is essential to everything from history to lyric poetry, from novels to the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Narrative theory explores how stories work and how we make them work. This Companion is both an introduction and a contribution to the field. It presents narrative theory as an approach to understanding all kinds of cultural production: from literary texts to historiography, from film and videogames to philosophical discourse. It takes the long historical view, outlines essential concepts, and reflects on the way narrative forms connect with and rework social forms. The volume analyzes central premises, identifies narrative theory's feminist foundations, and elaborates its significance to queer theory and issues of race. The specially commissioned essays are exciting to read, uniting accessibility and rigor, traditional concerns with a renovated sense of the field as a whole, and analytical clarity with stylistic dash. Topical and substantial, The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory is an engaging resource on a key contemporary concept.
This book studies the rise and nature of historicist approaches to life, race, character, language, political economy, and empire. Arguing that Victorians understood life and society as developing historically in a way that made history central to public culture, it will appeal to those interested in Victorian Britain, historiography, and intellectual history.
Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel rethinks the nineteenth-century aesthetics of agency through the Victorian novel's fascination with states of reverie, trance, and sleep. These states challenge contemporary scientific and philosophical accounts of the perfectibility of the self, which privileged reflective self-awareness. In dialogue with the field of literature and science studies and affect studies, this book shows how Victorian writers used narrative form to respond to the analytical practices and knowledge production of those other disciplines. Drawing upon canonical texts--by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy--Still Life contends that depictions of non-purposive perceptual experience suspend the processes of self-cultivation (Bildung) central to Victorian aesthetics, science, psychology, and political theory, as well as most critical accounts of the novel form. Departing from the values of individual cultivation and moral revelation associated with the genre, these writers offer an affective framework for understanding the subtly non-instrumental powers of narrative. Victorian novels ostensibly working within the parameters of the Bildungsroman are suspended by moments of "still life": a decentered lyricism associated with states of diminished consciousness. They use this style to narrate what should be unnarratable: experiences not dependent on reflective consciousness, which express a distinctive ambivalence toward dominant developmental frameworks of individual self-culture.
This book opens the curtain on the crucial role played by Victorian and Edwardian novelists in changing views of domestic violence. Examining the mechanisms of domestic violence through the historical lenses of the law, crime, and economics, this study illuminates these novelists’ depictions of wife-battering, including scenes in which women witness their children being beaten or children witness their mothers’ beatings. This book also shows how these representations interacted with changing paradigms of masculinity and femininity at the time. Extending from the decades before the 1857 Divorce Act to the Suffrage era, the book details the changing circumstances of conjugal violence and divorce in England. William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. (1844) and Caroline Norton’s Stuart of Dunleath: A Story of Modern Times (1851) expose the impact of class on reactions to domestic violence. Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875) and Ouida’s (Marie Louise de la Ramé) Moths (1880) depict proto-New Women figures who resist domestic violence, while traditional wife figures continue to fall victim. In Mona Caird’s The Wing of Azrael (1889) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange” (1904), protagonists exact their own justice on perpetrators of domestic violence. By the Edwardian period, it was clear that legislation alone could not solve the problems of domestic violence. Constance Maud’s No Surrender (1911) adroitly links wife-battering with public violence against suffragettes, exposing the underlying British socio-cultural system that maintained women’s subordination.