Cycles of influence : fiction, folktale, theory / Stephen Benson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Benson, Stephen, 1969-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature and folklore.

Postmodernism (Literature).

Tales--History and criticism.

Tales.

Fiction--History and criticism.

Fiction.

Physical Description:

314 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Detroit : Wayne State University Press, [2003]

Summary:

In this wide-ranging and insightful analysis, Stephen Benson proposes a poetics of narrative for postmodernism by placing new emphasis on the folktale. Postmodernist fictions have evidenced a return to narrative -- to storytelling centered on a sequence of events, rather than a "spiraling" of events as found in modernism -- and recent theorists have described narrative as a "central instance of the human mind." By characterizing the folktale as a prime embodiment of narrative, Benson relates folktales to many of the theoretical concerns of postmodernism and provides new insights into the works of major writers who have used this genre, which includes the subgenre of the fairy tale, to open narrative to new possibilities. Benson begins by examining the key traits of folktales: an emphasis on a chain of events rather than description or consciousness, an emphasis on a self-contained fictional environment rather than realism, the presence of a storyteller as a self-confessed fabricator, an oral and communal status, and an ever-changing state which defies authoritative versions. He traces the interactions between the folktale and Italo Calvino's Fiabe Italiane, between selected fictions of John Barth and the Arabian Nights, between the work of Robert Coover and the subgenre of the fairy tale, and between the "Bluebeard" stories and recent feminist retellings by Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. The arguments presented will interest not only folklorists and scholars of narrative but also readers in fields ranging from comparative literature to feminist theory.

Contents:

1. Tales in Theory: The Role of the Folktale in the Development of Narratology 17

2. Theory in Tales: Cycles, Levels, and Frames 43

3. The Idea of the Folktale in Italo Calvino 67

Italian Folktales: Text and Contexts 71

First Idea: Tradition and Ideology 84

Second Idea: Singular Fantasies 91

Third Idea: A "Geometry of Story-Telling" 101

4. Narrative Turns 115

John Barth, Author of the Arabian Nights 130

"Familiarity Breeds Consent": Robert Coover and the Fairy Tale 147

5. Craftiness and Cruelty: A Reading of the Fairy Tale and Its Place in Recent Feminist Fictions 167

"Curiosity ... Is Insubordination in Its Purest Form" 198.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0814329497

OCLC:

49936034