Narrative / Paul Cobley.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cobley, Paul, 1963-

Series:

New critical idiom

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Narration (Rhetoric).

Physical Description:

viii, 267 pages ; 21 cm.

Place of Publication:

London ; New York : Routledge, 2001.

Summary:

This accessible volume guides the reader through key issues in the history of narrative and narrotological theory, examining: early narrative; the rise of the novel; "realist" representation; early modernism; modernism and the cinema; and postmodernism, narrative and narratology.

Contents:

1 In the beginning: the end 1

Story, plot and narrative 4

Sequence 7

Space 12

Time 16

Phylogeny and ontogeny 21

2 Early narrative 29

Narrative and history 30

Orality, literacy and narrative 32

Universality and narrative 33

Narrative and identity 37

Hellenic and Hebraic foundations 41

Hybridity and the Western tradition 51

A voyage to the self 53

3 The rise and rise of the novel 56

Mimesis 57

Aristotelian mimesis 61

Imitation, quotation and identity 63

Epic, identity and the mixed mode 67

Questioning the voice in the Middle Ages 70

The low form of the romance and the rise of the novel 74

The triple rise thesis and beyond 77

Instruction, telling and narrative mode 81

4 Realist representation 88

Secretaries to the nineteenth century 89

Battles over realism 91

Middlemarch and 'classic realism' 94

Omniscient narration 100

Realism and the voices of narrative 104

Narrative with dirt under its fingernails 107

5 Beyond realism 117

Identity and the analysis of Heart of Darkness 119

Imperialism and repression 123

Imperialism and sexuality 127

Narrative, imperialism and the conflict of Western identity 132

The reader and the narrative 134

Narrative levels 138

6 Modernism and the cinema 146

Writing in light 153

The cinema and modernism 163

Just another 'realism'? 167

7 Postmodernism 171

'Meta' levels 174

History 179

The decline of the 'grand narrative' 183

New technologies 189

8 In the end: the beginning 201

Narrative in cyberspace 202

Reading narrative 205

Diversity and genres 209

Closure, verisimilitude and the narrative sign 215

The future of the narrative sign 223.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [246]-260) and index.

ISBN:

0415212626

0415212634

OCLC:

45592885