Style In Fiction Research Articles

New Arabian Nights: Stevenson's Experiment in Fiction

Research Article| December 01 1990 New Arabian Nights: Stevenson's Experiment in Fiction Barry Menikoff Barry Menikoff Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Literature (1990) 45 (3): 339–362. https://doi.org/10.2307/3045016 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Barry Menikoff; New Arabian Nights: Stevenson's Experiment in Fiction. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 December 1990; 45 (3): 339–362. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3045016 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1990 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

D. H. Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination: Essays on Sexual Identity and Feminist Misreading , and: States of Estrangement: The Novels of D. H. Lawrence, 1912-1917 , and: D. H. Lawrence: Modes of Fictional Style (review)

Reviewed by: D. H. Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination: Essays on Sexual Identity and Feminist Misreading, and: States of Estrangement: The Novels of D. H. Lawrence, 1912-1917, and: D. H. Lawrence: Modes of Fictional Style Lydia Blanchard Peter Balbert . D. H. Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination: Essays on Sexual Identity and Feminist Misreading. New York: St. Martin's, 1989. 190 pp. $29.95. Wayne Templeton . States of Estrangement: The Novels of D. H. Lawrence, 1912-1917. Troy: Whitston, 1989. 316 pp. $38.50. Bibhu Padhi . D. H. Lawrence: Modes of Fictional Style. Troy: Whitston, 1988. 223 pp. $22.50. In the more than twenty years since publication of Kate Milieu's criticism of D. H. Lawrence in Sexual Politics, there have been numerous responses—supporting Millett, defending Lawrence, working for a middle ground. The general reader might reasonably expect that the examination of the Lawrence/Millett controversy had been exhausted, but the general reader would be wrong. The question of Lawrence's understanding of women continues to fascinate, and for that reason, of the three books here under review, Peter Balbert's will undoubtedly provoke the most debate. D. H. Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination presents a reading of Lawrence with which, for the most part, I happen to disagree, but I nevertheless admire the power with which the argument is made. Before turning to that power, let me identify the basic quarrels that I have with Balbert's study. One is implied in the second half of his title: Essays on Sexual Identity and Feminist Misreading. Balbert might agree that not all feminists misread? [End Page 608] Lawrence, and his Introduction refers to feminist rejoinders to Millett (including one that I wrote for Modern Fiction Studies in 1975), but the actual study rarely takes this kind of response into account. Balbert does not refer to the work of Janice Harris, for example, who has presented a strong and reasoned reexamination of Millett, and he demonstrates no recognition that, for the most part, the majority of feminist critics no longer concern themselves with images of women in male writers, including Lawrence. The term feminist covers a wide range of responses that can be made by critics; Balbert makes his case on a limited sample. Indeed, a more accurate title for Balbert's study would be Millett's Misreading, for the book essentially restricts its consideration of feminism to a refutation of Sexual Politics (with secondary interest in Hilary Simpson's D. H. Lawrence and Feminism ). The index includes twenty-six citations for Millett, several of which cover up to four and five pages. The only writer from whom Balbert quotes more, other than Lawrence, is Norman Mailer, whose Prisoner of Sex informs much of Balbert's response. And therein lies a second concern with the study: its heavy reliance on Mailer. Balbert is essentially rehashing an old argument. Having made that point, however, I must confess that the old argument continues to engage. At the Lawrence International Conference this past summer in Montpellier, France, the best-attended panel was the one on Lawrence and feminist criticism, and one of the papers that drew the liveliest response reviewed, once again, Millett's work on Lawrence. Balbert's study not only serves as a useful review of the controversy, particularly in the early days of Prisoner of Sex, but also suggests some of the important reasons why this debate continues to engage us. The strength of Balbert's study—and the reason why it will be read, applauded, and denounced—is that it identifies the issues with such passion and clarity. Lawrence's understanding of the phallic imagination, as Balbert recognizes, was both conservative and radical. More brilliantly and more fully than any other writer of the twentieth century, Lawrence demonstrated the way in which our sexual lives are affected by and in turn affect modern institutions. Balbert reminds us of the importance that Lawrence placed on marriage; his comments on the way in which Lawrence's emerging faith in marriage drives The Rainbow are particularly fine. For Lawrence, the love between man and woman may be "damnably difficult and painful, but it is the only thing which endures." Balbert is...

D.H. Lawrence: modes of fictional style

D.H. Lawrence: modes of fictional style

Assessing Acceptability in Translated Children's Books

The purpose of the study outlined in this article is to compare the acceptability of style in two contemporary Finnish translations of L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz with special reference to the effect of sentence structure on acceptability. For the purposes of this study, acceptability is defined in terms of the norms and expectations prevailing in the language and style of Fin-nish children's fiction which include the requirements of a high degree of readability and natural style. The hypothesis is that the use of complex nonfinite con-structions in one translation decreases readability and consequently lowers acceptability, whereas the other translation is expected to be more readable and acceptable due to its natural, dynamic style characterized by simple finite cons-tructions. The syntactic structures relevant to the readability of the translations are analysed with the help of two linguistic models: a modification of phrasestructure grammar and a propositional model. Three empirical tests, i.e. a cloze test, subjective assessment and a reading test, provide information about the readability and acceptability of the translations.

Lacan, Argentine Politics, and Science Fiction in Manuel Puig's "Pubis Angelical"

The recent publication in English of Manuel Puig's fifth novel, Pubis Angelical,' is likely to present problems for English-language readers who have responded favorably to his first four books, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth,2 Heartbreak Tango,3 The Buenos Aires Affair,4 and Kiss of Spider Woman,s5 and who consequently may expect of same in his latest effort. While it is true that standard elements, fragmented, multilayered narrative, emphasis on psychological rather than external action, and sometimes outrageous fascination with popular culture (especially Hollywood films) are all there, it is nevertheless also true that Pubis Angelical introduces two new elements into Puigian canon, science fiction and psychoanalytical theories of Jacques Lacan, and that consequently this book represents a radical departure from Puig's earlier work. Moreover, Pubis Angelical is Puig's most overtly political novel to date, and therefore at least a general knowledge of recent (1970s) Argentine political history seems necessary for full understanding and appreciation. Given all of these facts about book, it is not surprising that some reviewers have found it to be a puzzling, odd, obscure, or somehow unsatisfactory performance. For example, reviewer Ray Sawhill uses term cracked lyricism to describe Puig's fictional style, and asserts that the novel has more intellectual machinery than it can support.6 Similarly, Robert Towers, writing in New York Review of Books, asserts that

Raja Rao's Inimitable Style and Art of Fiction

Raja Rao's Inimitable Style and Art of Fiction

The Tales of Henry James (review)

The Henry James Review FaU, 1986 Edward Wagenknecht. The Tales of Henry James. New York: Rederick Ungar, 1985. 266 pp. $16.50. With this book, Wagenknecht rounds out his comprehensive survey of Henry James's fiction begun with The Novels of Henry James published in 1983. Wagenknecht 's scholarship is formidable, since he seems to have read not only aU of James's fiction but also assimüated much of the criticism ever written about him. A good deal of this scholarship is crammed into the fifty pages of notes to The Tales of Henry James, but the text is also full of clear and vigorous dialogues with other critics. In these dialogues, Wagenknecht is both trenchant and eminently sensible. He deals summarily with some of the wilder flights of fantasy in Jamesian criticism, particularly on that much thumbed text, "The Turn of the Screw." In the body of his book, Wagenknecht confines his discussion to those stories that James included in the New York Edition, except for the tales in James's last collection, The Finer Grain. Wagenknecht notes that this volume was published after the New York Edition, and asserts that the tales in The Finer Grain are all sufficiently distinctive to merit fuU treatment in the book. He relegates to a thirty page appendix the forty-nine tales not included by James in the New York Edition. There they receive a brief discussion, in alphabetical order. The reader is not told whether the decision to organize the material in this way was the author's acknowledgment of James's wisdom about his own work, or the arbitrary desire of the publisher to limit the length of the book. In any event, I believe the decision to have been an unfortunate one. Although Wagenknecht had the space to treat fuUy some of the unaccountably neglected tales in the New York Edition—such as "JuUa Bride"—he lost the opportunity to evaluate, within the context of James's development, other equaUy neglected tales—among them "A New England Winter," "Sir Dominic Ferrand," and "The Solution." Another consequence of this decision, of course, is that James's early tales, most of which he excluded from the New York Edition, are hors de combat, so that Wagenknecht is forced to treat the crucial early years of James's development quite summarily. By page twenty-three of the book we are into James's middle years; this is a much foreshortened HJ! Once in his stride, however, Wagenknecht deals judiciously with James's oeuvre. He usually manages to strike a delicate balance between sources, plot summary, interpretation, and treatment of what he at one point caUs "the cloud of sense and nonsense" of existing critical study. The inquiring student can find in these pages much of the best of what has been thought and written about the major tales. Early in The Portrait of a Lady Isabel Archer says to her aunt, "Now what's your point of view? . . . When you criticise everything here you should have a point of view." It is a question I would also ask of Professor Wagenknecht in relation to his study. He might reply, with Mrs. Touchett, "My point of view, thank God, is personal!"—but that would not entirely satisfy me. It is difficult to find a particular theme, a uniting thread, in The Tales of Henry James. There are, of course, certain ideas, such as: "James is, above aU else, the novelist of experience imaginatively apprehended," and there are numerous allusions to Volume VIII 76 Number 1 The Henry James Review FaU, 1986 James's humanity, understanding, sympathy and humor, but the inquiring reader looks in vain for anything resembUng a theoretical framework within which the author might deal with the developing form and style of James's shorter fiction. This has the advantage of freeing Wagenknecht from any straitjacket of ideas, but it also invests him with a loose-fitting and entirely catholic coat of many critical colors. It may be that Wagenknecht, having had to read and digest such an enormous volume of material, both fictional and critical, was finally forced to come away with a view like that of Mrs. Touchett...

Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose

Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose

Reviews

Reviews Get access Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose . By GEOFFREY N. LEECH and MICHAEL H. SHORT . Pp. xiii+402 . London and New York : Longman , 1981 . Paperbound £6.95. RONALD CARTER RONALD CARTER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 31, Issue 4, December 1984, Pages 558–559, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/31-4-558 Published: 01 December 1984

Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose

Foreword Introduction Part I: Approaches and methods 1. Style and Choice 2. Style, Text and Frequency 3. A Method of Analysis and some Examples 4. Levels of Style Part II: Aspects of style 5. Language and the Fictional World 6. Mind Style 7. The Rhetoric of Text 8. Discourse and Discourse Situation 9. Conversation in the Novel 10. Speech and Thought Presentation Passages and topics for further study Further reading Bibliography Index of works discussed General index

Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose

Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose

Jacob's Room: Woolf's Satiric Elegy

Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room appeared in 1922, the annus mirabilis of modern literature that also produced Ulysses and The Waste Land. Perhaps for that reason, and because the novel was the first of Woolf's longer fictions to break with conventional narrative technique, it is often interpreted as a paradigmatic modernist text rather than as a unique work. Its peculiarities are treated as illustrative of the revolution in twentieth-century literature, though in fact some of them are idiosyncratic. The book was certainly Woolf's first consciously experimental novel; and it has remained her most baffling one: its narrative techniques are so innovative that they call attention to themselves; its central character, Jacob Flanders, seems to be a classic instance of psychological inscrutability in fiction; and its rapidly shifting tone, now somber, now mocking, deprives Woolf's audience of a stable sense of her own attitude toward the world she describes. These problems of narrative method, characterization, and tone are interrelated, as I hope to show, but they can be illuminated only by an attempt to understand Woolf's fundamental aims in writing the particular novel Jacob's Room, rather than by assuming she was interested in fictional innovation for its own sake. Jacob's Room is often taken to be simply a technical exercise. David Daiches, for example, suggests that it was written might say, for the sake of style.' And indeed Woolf's first thoughts about the book in her diary are concerned with method rather than matter: Suppose one thing should open out of another-as in An Unwritten Novel-only not for 10 pages but 200 or so-doesn't that give the looseness and lightness I want; doesn't that get closer and yet keep form and speed, and enclose everything?2 Her diary entries as she works on the book continue to deal more with narrative strategy than with defining the everything, everything the novel is designed to present. Essentially, Woolf was trying to work free of the conventions of realism she attacked with such devastating wit in her essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, that style of fiction in which the character is kept waiting in the wings until his entire environment and life history have been

Contemporary Prose Styles

We hear many complaints about contemporary fiction-that its characters are flat and its stories are dull-but we hear no complaints about prose style. For in fact, prose styles have been one of the great strengths of Western fiction throughout this century. Prose style in fiction is like surface handling in painting. No matter how much people complain that contemporary works are saying little, no one denies that they say it very well. We may distinguish among contemporary prose styles two overlapping strands. One is what we might call for the moment plain, the other fancy. Neither of these prose styles is distinctively, diagnostically modernist in the contemporary sense. Any sort of writer may use any sort of prose. But the fancy styles, in particular, may further modernist intentions by calling attention to themselves.

Wessex, Hardy and the Nature Novelists

Wessex, Hardy and the Nature Novelists

Dialogue and Characterization in The Portrait of a Lady

DIALOGUE AND CHARACTERIZATION IN THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY Carla L. Peterson* Dialogue is a unique mode of discourse in the novel and an important element in the reader's enjoyment of a story. For, unlike all other narrative modes, dialogue speech suggests that a character is directly expressing his thoughts and feelings to other characters—and to the readers—without the mediation of a narrator. In addition, the direct speech of dialogue is meant to give the impression that a character is talking in his own chosen words; thus, not only what he says but also the manner in which he says it tells much about him. The very way in which a character goes about articulating his thoughts in language should function, then, to enhance the perception of his personality . The development of dialogue seems, however, to have been a slow one in the history of the novel. Indeed, novelists seem generally to have found it easier to let their narrators tell about their characters in their own narrative style rather than let the characters speak for themselves in their own voice.1 Henry James, writing at a time when novelists in America were slowly becoming interested in the general question of colloquial style in fiction,2 repeatedly argued in essays and in the prefaces to his novels that dialogue is indeed a unique mode for recording characters' thoughts with properties all of its own. In the Preface to The Awkward Age James spoke of his efforts to write dialogue which is "really constructive dialogue, dialogue organic and dramatic, speaking for itself, representing and embodying substance and form."3 Such dialogue obviates the necessity of the storyteller's "going behind" to "explain and amplify" his subject matter; it make[s] the presented occasion tell all its story itself (p. 111). Although the dialogued "scene" never stands alone but is always found in conjunction with the "going behind" of the narrator (or the "picture") , it remains the higher of the two "compositional forms," "crowning" the picture which is but its "discriminated preparation" (p. 323). •Carla L. Peterson is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of Maryland. She has written on Flaubert and James and is now working on a book on women in the nineteenth-century novel. 14Carla L. Peterson Critics of James' style have generally argued that his novels are written in a "uniform plain style" which tends to break down the distinction between the three originally separate genres and prose styles of narrative, essay, and drama. As Leonard Lutwack has argued, "the essayistic material . . . , the dramatic material, and the narrative . . . have no existence as independent genres and are presented in a prose style that is essentially uniform."4 But within the confines of his uniform plain style James sought for ways to make every one of his dialogued scenes "organic and dramatic, speaking for itself, representing and embodying substance and form." An illustration of the care with which James constructed his scenes may be found in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) in the conversation between Isabel Archer and Gilbert Osmond on the occasion of her first visit to his hilltop house outside of Florence.5 There is seemingly nothing very interesting about this dialogue; indeed, it may come to the reader as something of a disappointment as nothing of great moment is said and a kind of stylistic sameness seems to permeate the speech of both characters. And yet this passage reveals itself to be an excellent example of the complexity of James' presentation of character, as subtle differences in language usage here intimate profound differences in personality and attitudes between the protagonists which emerge explicitly only much later in the novel. What the reader of the novel knows about Isabel Archer up to this point of the narrative is that she is a high-spirited young American woman recently come to Europe and recently come into an inheritance of 70,000 pounds. While the narrator describes her as full of intelligence , imagination, mental acuity, and good taste, he also says that she has a tendency to think a little too well of herself. While she professes a great attachment to...

Nazism and Postwar German Literary Style

It is only very recently that contemporary German writing has become more extensive in its interests and subject matter than the work of a generation bent upon the portrayal and reappraisal of the recent past. Though much has been written on the moral and philosophical implications of the Nazi years for the postwar generation and on the difficulty of the problem of the reconstruction of German literature,1 relatively little has been said about the ways in which the Nazi past has affected the style of fiction and drama since the war.2 Consider, for example, the revival of the picaresque hero and the picaresque mode (characters such as Oskar and Amsel in Giinter Grass's novels and Bachmann

The Rhythms of Power in Paule Marshall's Fiction

Apart from the usual review notices in the usual periodicals, there has been no noteworthy discussion of Paule Marshall's major works-the novels, Brown Girl Brownstones (1959) and The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), and a quartet of novellas, Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961). This neglect is unfortunate, because Paule Marshall's major themes are both significant and timely. Her West Indian background (Barbadian parentage) enables Paule Marshall to invest her North American materials with a Caribbean perspective, and in the process she invokes that Pan-African sensibility which has become so important in contemporary definitions of Black identity. Secondly, her treatment of the Black woman links her ethnic themes with the current feminist revolt. Finally, the ethnic and sexual themes are integrated with the novelist's interest in the subject of power. This interest is the logical outcome of her preoccupation with groups-women and Blacks-whose roles have been defined by powerlessness. But her treatment of this subject is complex and innovative because she analyses power not only as the political goal of ethnic and feminist movements, but also as social and psychological phenomena which simultaneously affect racial and sexual roles, shape cultural traditions, and mould the individual psyche. Indeed, Paule Marshall's style invariably includes images of power-asexperience. She is a good example, in this regard, of those novelists in whom the recurrence of major themes imposes a distinctive iconography on their narrative forms. We can trace throughout her fiction rhythms of movement and sound which symbolically dramatize the dynamics of power in several forms-physical force, will power, political and sexual power, and so on. This power symbolism imparts a distinctive rhythm to her fictional forms as a whole: the narrative opens and closes with identical or similar symbols of power; or her themes present certain forms of power, such as death and the life-force, as alternating cycles in the cosmos. Paule Marshall's style therefore defines her themes. It fulfils the concept of fictional style not merely as a mode of dramatic delimitation, but more precisely, of definition.' One of her short-stories, To Da-duh, In Memoriam, is typical of her rhythmic use of symbols for thematic definition. Briefly, this is the auto-biographical story of a young girl from Brooklyn on her first visit to her parents' family in Barbados. During the visit her spirited clashes with her grandmother, Da-duh, dramatize the conflict of two life-styles: the rural traditions of the old woman's pre-technological society versus the young Brooklynite's machine culture. After

The Sound and the Fury and Faulkner's Quest for Form

In The Sound and the Fury Faulkner passed abruptly from his novels of promise to the first achievement of his mastery, chiefly because he had found a form commensurate to his vision-a succession of grotesquely shaped fragments struggling to discover their own unity. In the sequence of narratives which constitutes the novel, Faulkner grasped his world both in its fact and its direction, what it was and what it was striving to become. Nearly all of Faulkner's subsequent novels-and certainly all the major ones-are conceived as studies in fragmentation, violently juxtaposed stations of a broken world, apparently drawn together only by a common subject of concern or by parallel actions informing distinctly separate stories. The technique reveals itself in the sequence of voices in The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom!, in the subtly complementary patterns of Light in August and The Hamlet, the integration of two novels in The Wild Palms, or the oddly arranged days of the Passion in A Fable. The primary motivation of the work-although rarely achieved and never sustained-is the quest of one fragment to move into the life of another, to shatter the private prison and stand at least momentarily in relationship itself. The aesthetic, not to say moral, richness of this fictional style, this dream of unity perceived through multiple glasses, cannot be under-estimated. While Faulkner seems to us one of the less conscious artists of our time, in comments on his own work almost deliberately insensitive to their complexity and difficulty, his best novels reveal a staggering artistry-and a writer who may be said to have seen through to the end of his art. The fictions themselves are securely aware of what they are doing, the problems they are raising, and the only solutions possible from the givens of the technique. At its best, in other words, the art is an unsparingly honest one. To put it perhaps too lightly, Faulkner's characteristic form is

Style and Purpose in Maria Edgeworth's Fiction

Style and Purpose in Maria Edgeworth's Fiction

Style and Purpose in Maria Edgeworth's Fiction

How I wish I could furnish, as Scott has, some of those pictured tales coloured to the life; but I fear I have not that power, therefore it is perhaps that I strive to console myself for my deficiencies of flattering myself that there is much, though not such glorious use, in my own lesser manner and department. The great virtues, the great vices excite strong enthusiasm, vehement horror, but after all it is not so necessary to warn the generality of mankind against these, either by precept or example, as against lesser faults.'