Toward a Syntax of Fiction

Abstract

THE THEORY OF FICTION, to give it its common if somewvhat inflated designation, has developed into one of the major industries of English and American criticism of the last decade. After a long period during which Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction (1921) more or less dominated theoretical or quasi-theoretical discussions of the novel, and most other studies consisted either of disjunctive essays in individual explication (as in the work of R. P. Blackmur or Dorothy Van Ghent), or historical panoramas of varying proportions of fact and evaluation (as with Arnold Kettle or Walter Alien), the mid-1950's saw a resurgence of interest in the deep-structure properties of the fictive act itself which continues to produce a variety of systems and approaches whose excitement is not diminished by their frequent partiality. Such books as Northrop Fryes' Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), W. J. Harvey's Character and the Novel (1965), and Robert Scholes' and Robert Kellogg's The Nature of Narrative (1966) represent important contributions to a new