Categories Of Fiction Research Articles

Cultural Context Study on the Literary Genealogy of The Uninvited

The Banquet Bug , the first English novel by Geling Yan, an American Chinese Writer, was published first in the U.S.A to great critical acclaim and was awarded the Golden Prize in the fiction category by Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA). This essay, from the perspective of literary genealogy, studies its unique cultural context. Based on the study of the specific cultural contexts, the author tries to unveil the mystery of the unique style of Yan’s novels from the angle of literary genealogy.

In Defense of Genreblending


 Readers often only care about one distinction when it comes to things they read—is it fiction or nonfiction? Did it happen or didn’t it? Presumably, we make sense of events we believe happened in a different way than we make sense of the ones that we don’t believe. Deconstructionists often warn us about the hazards that occur with the strict binary thinking we tend to orient ourselves with. When this binary is blurred, which it often is in many contemporary works of literature, readers become unsettled. It is our position that genre, and even the more broad categories of fiction and nonfiction, should not be found exclusively as properties internal to the text itself, but rather, the way we make sense of genre is an active process of narrative comprehension. We will question how the particular binary concerning fiction and nonfiction has sold us short concerning the ways in which we make sense of literary texts, and how much more fluid our notions of genre really could and should be. We also want to argue that the reduction of the binary of genre merely into fiction and nonfiction is a gross oversimplification of the ways in which we understand both genres themselves, as well as the ways in which we understand both truth and reference.

Is self-publishing a salvation for authors? The case of Lithuanian printed bestseller in the digital environment

There has been much speculation in the past years about self-publishing. Some argue that publishing houses do not have a future as publishing service providers. Others claim that it is very easy to publish a book as an e-book. There are many success stories of self-publishers. More and more authors are wondering if they actually need a publisher and a retailer knowing they always take the biggest cut of the pie. The paper looks at the case of a Lithuanian author bestseller (in print). This book has also received the Lithuanian Book of the Year Award in the Fiction category. The author had the book published in Lithuanian by a traditional publishing house. It was quite successful so he decided to self-publish a digital version in English. The steps taken by the author to publish his e-book on Amazon are described and analyzed. Finally, the paper presents the results of selling and promoting his e-book on Amazon platform and provides some insights into facing the market without professional help.

Narrazione eccentrica e testimonianza in Gomorra di Roberto Saviano

Eccentric Narration and Testimony in Roberto Saviano’s Gomorra If post-modern literature is often assumed to be characterized by the aporetic fusion of fictional and non-fictional contents, forms and structures, post-modern literary criticism seems to still struggle to avoid analyzing contemporary literature without leading itself back to the two static, dichotomous categories of fiction and non-fiction. This article attempts to penetrate the narrative structure of one of the most controversial Italian contemporary novels, Gomorra. It interprets this structure with the help of these two categories which are not considered stable and generative with respect to the narration itself, but are rather seen as derivative refractions of the hybridity of Saviano’s novel. In order to achieve this goal a comparison is made between three different, yet complementary texts. Firstly, it analyzes the continuity in narrative structure between Truman Capote’s non-fiction novel In Cold Blood and Gomorra. Moreover, it identifies the points of divergence that turn Saviano’s novel into an independent phenomenon of post-modern Italian literature. This divergence will be compared to the definition of Unidentified Narrative Objects (U.N.O.) proposed by Wu Ming in their programmatic essay New Italian Epic. Finally, it examines the connection between narration and testimony in Saviano’s Gomorra through Jacques Derrida’s theoretical conception in Demeure: Fiction and Testimony.

Historicity of Categories of Fiction: Virginia Woolf’s Concept “Modern Fiction”

This article attempts to construct Woolf’s concept of “modern fiction” in modern context within the two dimensions: fiction’s category and historicity. Firstly, based on the essay “Modern Fiction”, the article aims to construct the connotation of “modern fiction”, which takes “historical consciousness”, “the duration of life”, “man’s subjectivity”, “the complexity of psychological structures” and “the relativity and pluralism of reality” as its contents. Then, this article mainly demonstrates the categories of “modern fiction”, which is employed to reveal the properties and attributes of fiction and regulates its fundamental mode of existence. Woolf’s “modern fiction” serves as a substance, around which the categories revolve. They are composed of “look within”, “impression”, “memory” and “feeling”, “the moment of importance”, “the psychological time” and “the flow of consciousness”. Thirdly, this article attempts to discuss the historicity of categories of “modern fiction”, namely the finiteness and openness of categories. For Woolf’s part, the categories of traditional fiction in the historical vision must be replaced by new ones due to its finiteness. In the discontinuity of the historical process, Woolf proceeds with the openness of categories of fiction, reflects the mental disorder of people, instills order in literary works and dissolves the dichotomy of man and self, man and the other, man and nature. Finally, the article concludes that in Woolf’s literary criticism, the categories of fiction are an open system. Woolf’s concept of “modern fiction” and its categories in modern condition guarantee the openness of fiction.

The melting pot: Parafiction Art in Israel and Palestine

Abstract Art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty offers the term ‘Parafiction Art’ to describe an emergent genre of artwork in which the artist imitates, invents, fakes or makes up narratives, people or events that are perceived by the spectators, for different reasons and for different lengths of time, as true. These works play on the overlap between fact and fiction in a unique manner: Like a paramedic as opposed to a medical doctor, a parafiction is related to but not quite a member of the category of fiction as established in literature and drama. It remains a bit outside. It does not perform its procedures in the hygienic clinics of literature, but has one foot in the field of the real. (Lambert-Beatty 2009: 54) This is why Parafiction Art possesses the power to influence specific contexts, and to challenge their statuesque. Arguing for the special importance of Parafiction Art within political contexts that strongly adhere to specific truth-values, this article examines recent parafictional practices in Israel and Palestine, and how these works challenge the hegemonic regime in this problematic geopolitical context: the right-wing Israeli government on one hand and the terrorist attacks on the other. Hardly any English literature has been published on the subject to date.

A Taste for Murder: The Curious Case of Crime Fiction

A Taste for Murder: The Curious Case of Crime Fiction

Women and Other Art Objects

At the National Book Awards ceremony this past November, Rachel Kushner read a section from her second novel, The Flamethrowers , a finalist in the fiction category. She chose a scene set at a New York dinner party in 1976, in which a middle-aged artist named Stanley Kastle plays his guests a tape in which he muses about language and real estate: “A good realtor says ‘home.’ Never ‘house.’ Always ‘cellar’ and never ‘basement.’ Basements are where cats crap on old Santa costumes. Where men drink themselves to death. Where children learn firsthand about sexual molestation. But cellar. A cellar is where you keep root vegetables and wine.” Kushner’s reading lasted five minutes, but she didn’t get through half of Stanley’s recorded speech.

Bridging the Gap: An Inquiry into New Adult as a Viable Category of Fiction

This paper serves as an investigation into the burgeoning fiction category known as “new adult”, a category conceived to appeal to the current post-adolescent age bracket. It traces the category's origins to November 2009 from a submission competition held by St Martin's Press and addresses criticism of new adult that has arisen in the literary community over the past three years. The paper next examines the perspectives of authors of new adult, through commentary by author Hannah Johnson, and the intended audience of new adult, through the commentary of three readers who fall within the relevant bracket. It concludes that the evident hole in the literary market demands the fostering of the new adult category, especially in light of the historical success of the young adult category and also in light of marked reader demand for new adult content.

A misunderstanding: trauma and terrorism in the '9/11 fiction'

The terrorist attacks in September 2001 were largely deemed by the media and cultural circles to be traumatic events. Since then, literary criticism has indiscriminately employed the concept of trauma in the so-called '9/11 fiction'. I shall offer a reading of Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days (2005) and Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) regarding their critical view of the term. My contention is that the predominance of trauma as a theoretical apparatus for literary works is due to a) a misreading of the very term, detached from its original legal-medical context, and b) a slippage between the categories of fiction and history.

May I suggest murder? An overview of crime fiction for readers’ advisory services staff

Crime fiction first started to gain widespread popularity in the 18th century, a popularity which dramatically increased in the 19th century. Today, almost one in every three new books published in English falls into the crime fiction category. Since the early days of crime fiction the genre has evolved into an incredibly diverse area of fiction, making it one of Australia’s, and the world’s, most popular. There is, literally, a dead body to suit every reader’s taste. Such scale and scope of choice, however, can create challenges for readers wanting to read crime fiction for the first time or wanting to extend their reading past a favourite author or series. This overview of the genre identifies the main sub-genres of crime fiction, providing a set of concise definitions illustrated with international and Australian examples of crime fiction works.

Introduction: "The Best of Times, the Worst of Times"

SPECIAL SECTION Introduction: "The Best of Times, the Worst of Times" Michelle Yeh In thewake of the liftingofmartial law in 1987, Taiwan witnessed a media boom. Newspapers, magazines, and radio and television stations proliferated. Television programming began to run 24/7, and daily news papers expanded fromsix to twenty-some pages. In addition to the usual political, business, and sports sections and the literary supplement, the new space was devoted to subjects like travel, fashion,and family life.1 Such euphoria was short-lived, however. Brutal competition has led todownsizing of erst while leading newspapers (for example, Unit ed Daily and China Times), while many smaller ones have folded. The best-selling newspaper in recentyears is theApple Daily. Launched inMay 2003, thenewspaper, which is owned by a Hong Kong-based conglomerate, appeals to readers with prominent visuals (graphic pictures) and blatant sensationalism (paparazzi-style exposes). The cause of the shift ismultifarious. In the era of fulldemocracy and liberalization, of increasing urbanization and globalization, "market law" has indeed replaced "martial law" as thedriving force behind cultural production and consumption.2 For newspapers and magazines, the market has become more bifurcated: readers either gravitate toward "hardcore news" or look for lighthearted entertainment. Literature seems to have fallen through the cracks.Despite the fact thatseveral leading news papers continue to sponsor annual creative writ ing contests, thenumber of submissions has gone down dramatically, and a significantpercentage come from mainland China.3 In the past, the liter ary supplement was an important?perhaps the most important?venue for literature; it played a major role in literary history and cultural develop ment. But ithas shrunk inboth space and impact. The situation in which literaturefinds itselfresults from two interrelated forces. First, literature has a hard time competingwith the fast-growingvisual culture and entertainment industry. Second, litera ture is facedwith diminishing publication outlets. Sales of books in general have plummeted. On thebest-seller lists,translations typically make up more thanhalf the titles.In the category of fiction, almost 90 percent are translations, and the sales ofbooks by Taiwanese authors are 80 percent less than those of translations.The disparity is similar to Taiwanese-made films versus foreign films. Like newspapers andmagazines, thebook market has become bifurcated as well. Referred to as the "M-shaped" market, it specializes either in books thatsellmore than 100,000 copies or inbooks that sell fewer than 2,000. Medium-sized markets that formerlysold 5,000-20,000 copies per book have virtually disappeared. The decline ofprintmedia and the shrinking of the book market have exacerbated themarginal ization of literature. Of all thegenres, thepersonal essay does better than fiction,and fictionbetter than poetry. However, even in the case of poetry, far from fulfillingtheprediction of the "death of literature" thathas been bantered about foryears, itdisplays great vitality,which ismanifest in sev eral ways: a multigenerational poetry scene, the emergence of "handmade poetry books," and a poetics ofperformativityand everyday life. First of all, at least fourgenerations of poets are active on the poetry scene in Taiwan. Although thissimple fact may sound unremarkable in itself, considering thehistory ofmodern Chinese poetry since its inception in the 1910s,duringwhich wars 3 January- February 2010 i23 INTRODUCTION and political turmoil have severely disrupted or even silenced poetry, thepresence of four or five generations of active poets entails a profound sense of continuity and tradition. The present selections epitomize this phe nomenon. Yang Mu (b. 1940) is themost senior among thegroup, with a career ofhalf a century. His poetry is characterized by an intense lyri cism thatblends the personal with the fantastic, thepedestrian with the cosmic. Chen Li (b. 1954) has been active since the 1970s; increasingly, his work explores the aural and visual attributes of theChinese language with unexpected whimsical effects.Besides being a poet and fictionwriter, Hung Hung (b. 1964) is a film and stage direc tor, scriptwriter, and actor. After serving as an editor for the avant-garde journal PoetryNow, he founded the journal Off theRoll, Poetry+ in 2008, which features poetry as well as translations of contemporary drama. Enid (b. 1969), whose name means "Hidden" inChinese, belongs toa younger generation. She made her debut on the Internet and is the owner of a boutique bookstore in...

Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative

Comics—A form once considered pure junk—Is sparking interest in literary studies. I'm as amazed as anybody else by the comics boom—despite the fact that I wrote an English department dissertation that makes the passionate case that we should not ignore this innovative narrative form. Yet if there's promoting of comics, there's also confusion about categories and terms. Those of us in literary studies may think the moves obvious: making claims in the name of popular culture or in the rich tradition of word-and-image inquiry (bringing us back to the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages). But comics presents problems we're still figuring out (the term doesn't settle comfortably into our grammar; nomenclature remains tricky and open to debate). The field hasn't yet grasped its object or properly posed its project. To explore today's comics we need to go beyond preestablished rubrics: we have to reexamine the categories of fiction, narrative, and historicity. Scholarship on comics—and specifically on what I will call graphic narrative—is gaining traction in the humanities. Comics might be defined as a hybrid word-and-image form in which two narrative tracks, one verbal and one visual, register temporality spatially. Comics moves forward in time through the space of the page, through its progressive counterpoint of presence and absence: packed panels (also called frames) alternating with gutters (empty space). Highly textured in its narrative scaffolding, comics doesn't blend the visual and the verbal—or use one simply to illustrate the other—but is rather prone to present the two nonsynchronously; a reader of comics not only fills in the gaps between panels but also works with the often disjunctive back-and-forth ofreadingandlookingfor meaning. Throughout this essay, I treat comics as a medium—not as a lowbrow genre, which is how it is usually understood. However, I will end by focusing attention on the strongest genre in the field: nonfiction comics.

Print Culture, Ephemera, and the Elizabethan News Pamphlet

AbstractScholars have long explored the unparalleled impact of the printing press and the ability of the new technology to disseminate books and ideas. More recently, bibliographers and historians have turned their attention toward ephemera, including news pamphlets and other ad hoc publications. This research continues to yield rich information about the publication of printed matter in the early decades of the printing press. This essay reviews some recent scholarship on this important topic and demonstrates how one rare pamphlet (it survives in only a single copy) displays sophisticated reading practices, encourages questioning of genre, and suggests the importance of ephemeral publications. This pamphlet, A Subtil Practice, confuses the categories of fiction and non‐fiction while participating in a lively discussion about the English involvement in the French civil wars of religion. The contemporary marginalia found in the pamphlet allows us a glimpse of an early response to the pamphlet and a single reaction to the conflated worlds of fiction and non‐fiction.

Tirana 2005

TIRANA INTERNATIONAL SHORT FILM FESTIVAL 2005 After two strong outings, abetted by the breaking news that Tirana was chosen "World City 2005," it was a sure bet that the Third Tirana International Short Film Festival (5-11 December 2005) would go big time on the world festival stage too. With more than 20,000 Euros in purse prizes as bait, this year's TIFF received over 700 applications from 65 countries for entry in its five sections: 370 in the fiction category, 185 in animation, 85 in documentary, 60 in experimental, and 30 more in the cross-country Albanian-language shorts section. In addition, festival director Ilir Butka and programmer Genc Permeti programmed 27 feature films in free-fall evening programs that ran deep into the night. Most important of all for a festival's continued existence, TIFF 2005 could count on the support of 35 sponsors, plus the city's foreign ambassadors and cultural centres, for...

Designer History: Plato's Atlantis Story and Fourth-Century Ideology

The myth of Athens and Atlantis in Plato'sTimaeusandCritiascan be, and has been, interpreted on a number of different levels. On the most fundamental, philosophical level the myth sets into narrative motion the paradigm of the ideal state elaborated in theRepublic.Gill, in a series of publications, has done much to throw light on the nature of this invention: its relationship with modern categories of fiction and with antecedent historiography. Yet the extent to which the myth of Atlantis is embedded in larger fourth-century political and historiographical concerns has been insufficiently appreciated. In what follows, I shall attempt to reconstruct some of these concerns. I shall argue, first, that the narrative set-up of the Atlantis myth corresponds to the conditions specified in theRepublicfor the successful creation of a charter myth (the ‘Noble Lie’) for the ideal city, and that this is a valuable indication of the truth status of the myth and of the function it is expected to perform. This function is not merely a matter of abstract philosophical interest, since there are close parallels between the Atlantis myth and contemporary panegyric versions of Athenian history; in Section III, therefore, I shall explore these parallels through an examination of some Isocratean orations. Sections IV and V will investigate how such panegyric history illuminates areas of ideological concern for Athenians in the first half of the fourth century, most notably worries about legitimating the constitution(politeia)under which they lived, and about the attitude that should be taken towards Athenian maritime interests in the Aegean. The Atlantis myth creates a vision of Athens that is true to Plato's political ideals, but which is animated by contemporary historicaltopoi.The result is a narrative for an audience of philosophicalcognoscentithat both rejects and transforms suchtopoi, and sparks a second-order consideration of the forces at work in the construction of history.

Fourth Graders' Literature Preferences

Abstract A regionally balanced sample of fourth graders (253 girls and 239 boys) expressed their literature preferences on a 68-item fictitious annotated titles inventory. The inventory was constructed using 26 categories of fiction and nonfiction based on Schulte's (1968) and Huck and Young's (1961) children's literature classifications. Half of each subject's survey consisted of items that he or she was to consider reading; the other half included items that the subject was to consider watching on video or film. Descriptions of preferences emerged from separate factor analyses of boys' and girls' responses. The following categories were represented in both the girls' and the boys' three top-ranked factors: traditional and modern fantasy, realistic fiction about romance and adjustment, historical fiction, science and health, and biography. Only three factors could be named using category names from the original 26 children's literature categories. Eight factors could be explained in terms of the content ...

The Concept of the Paratheatrical

We live in the age of the para: para-this, para-that, parapsychological, paramedical, paratheatrical. Traditional classifications of human activity are not adequate to contain our behaviors, and we try to convert borderline areas into more or less legitimate classes of acts. All that is solid melts into air, as Marx said in The Communist Manifesto. We push, bend, and overlap our categories, but we are not quite sure what they contain and what they exclude. We improvise with the paramilitary, for example, to-capture strange activity. How about a man who is recruited through Soldier of Fortune magazine to fight in a revolutionary band in a foreign nation? What is his status? When he kills is this murder or killing in the line of duty? It depends on the matter of legitimacy, and this is just what is in question. The most intriguing of the para's is, I believe, the paratheatrical. In a certain way it is even the most disquieting. For when we extend the idea of the theatrical beyond its traditional confines of artistic performance we are crossing the line which divides fiction from fact and attempting to apply categories of fiction to the domain of fact. What is a human activity which is an artistic performance? An essential feature of this activity is that it be bounded and protected by a playing area of some sort. The boundaries are spatial, temporal, and cultural, and they radically limit the influences which can pass between events in the playing area and events in the outside world. Nothing is to occur in the playing area which generates consequences in the outside that are considered there to be illegal or seriously destructive. Thus a murder which occurs as an event between characters in a play is not to involve the death of the person who enacts the murdered character, for, obviously, this person is expected to continue to exist in the larger world. Likewise, nothing is to happen in the outside or in the audience which intervenes in the play's world in a way which is considered destructive of it. Thus the playing area is sealed off from the outside in ways which are sufficient to call what occurs there a fiction. However, the sealing is far from total, and much factual reality is involved in creating the fiction.

History, Realism, and the Work of Henry James

H I S T O R Y , R E A L I S M , A N D T H E W O R K O F H E N R Y J A M E S J. M. CAMERON University of Toronto I t seems to follow from our knowing that imaginative literature consists of things that are made up, that questions about how far this or that fiction is “realistic” can have no sense. What is imitated or referred to or rendered by a fiction? What could be meant by claiming that an account of a battle or a love-affair in a fiction is true (or untrue), faithful (or unfaithful), or “real” (or unreal) ? It seems to follow from something’s being a fiction, and not a report, that there is nothing of which it could be a true or false account. Tourists may be eager to see the place where Mr. Pickwick got into the wrong bedroom — after all, isn’t the Great White Horse still there in Ipswich? — or where Sherlock Holmes had his duel with Professor Moriarty; but this we feel to be an amiable weakness of mind, a tribute to the bright hallucinations contrived by the expert framer of fictions. Someone once put as an epigraph to a novel: “ I am not I; he is not he; she is not she.” One could falsely claim that something was a fiction and use the claim as a cover for libel — a lying account is not the same kind of thing as a fictional account. Since World War II there have been some silly plays in which the recently dead are portrayed with gross malice as murderers or poltroons; it seems wrong for the author to defend himself on the ground that what he has written is a fiction. This is like courting a woman and going through a marriage ceremony with her, and then at the end of it all saying It was only a joke. Such a claim wouldn’t exempt a man from prosecution for bigamy. But these are borderline cases. Barsetshire, Hardy’s Wessex, George Eliot’s Loamshire, Scott’s Louis xi, Trollope’s Plantagenet Palliser, James’s Isabel Archer, are all equally fictions no matter what geographical and historical references may exist in the intentions of the author and the mind of the reader. But fictions have sense. If they don’t involve, in the same way as do his­ torical accounts and geographical descriptions, reference to the world, how do they appear to have such reference? The states of affairs the writer of fictions feigns to describe are possible, that is, we know what would be the case if this or that description were true. Plainly it is possible for a man to English Studies in Canada, x, 3, September 1984 smother his wife out of jealousy, or for husband and wife to conspire to kill the king; and it is also possible for the hero to kiss the princess out of a hundred-year-old sleep and for the queen of the fairies to be infatuated with an ass. The case of the sleeping beauty, the case of Titania and the “trans­ lated” Bottom, these are possible in the Humeian sense: that whatever we can imagine is possible. What limits this sense of possible is a difficult ques­ tion. We are inclined to think it is not a possible description if we say that that the square roots of numbers are falling in love with the roses; but then we remember what Lewis Carroll is able to do in the two Alice books. Even what is in a more extreme sense than the fairy-story sense not possible may be treated as possible in a fiction. This we call nonsense. I mention it to bring out the broadness of the category of fiction. We are still faced with this problem: all fictions have the form of accounts of states of affairs, but they are not accounts of states of affairs that exist independently of the fiction. Some are accounts of states of affairs we should be inclined to say are naturally impossible (the kind of thing we say doesn...

Wasted Heritage and Waste Heritage: The Critical Disregard of an Important Canadian Novel

This paper deals with the critical response to Waste Heritage, Irene Baird’s 1939 novel about social unrest in western Canada. The paper argues that Waste Heritage is an example of a category of fiction which can loosely be called "the novel of engagement," a category which is a dominant form of twentieth-century fiction, but which is also part of the mainstream of the western literary tradition. The paper goes on to argue that Waste Heritage has been ignored because of a "category mistake" in Canadian criticism which labelled such novels ’’social propaganda’’ and refused to consider them on their literary merits. The paper concludes with an analysis of those merits in Waste Heritage.