New testaments : cognition, closure, and the figural logic of the sequel, 1660-1740 / Michael Austin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Austin, Michael, 1966-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

English fiction.

English fiction--18th century--History and criticism.

Closure (Rhetoric).

Fiction--Technique.

Fiction.

Narration (Rhetoric).

Sequels (Literature).

Bible--Language, style.

Bible.

Rhetoric in the Bible.

Physical Description:

xv, 163 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Newark : University of Delaware Press ; Lanham, Md. : Rowman & Littlefield, [2012]

Summary:

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, popular works of literature attracted-as they attract today-sequels, prequels, franchises, continuations, and parodies. Sequels of all kinds demonstrate the economic realities of the literary marketplace. This represents something fundamental about the way human beings process narrative information. We crave narrative closure, but we also resist its finality, making such closure both inevitable and inadequate in human narratives. Many cultures incorporate this fundamental ambiguity toward closure in the mythic frameworks that fuel their narrative imaginations. New Testaments: Cognition, Closure, and the Figural Logic of the Sequel, 1660-1740 examines both the inevitability and the inadequacy of closure in the sequels to four major works of literature written in England between 1660 and 1740: Paradise Lost, The Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and Pamela. Each of these works spawned sequels that-while often different from the original works-connected themselves through rhetorical strategies that can be loosely defined as figural. Such strategies came directly from the culture's two dominant religious narratives: the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible, two vastly dissimilar works seen universally as complementary parts of a unified and coherent narrative. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction

Narrative closure as a cognitive problem

God's sequel

His great duel, not of arms: Davidic typology

And rhetorical combat in Paradise regained

The figural logic of the sequel and the unity of The pilgrim's progress

"Jesting with the truth": figura, trace, and the boundaries of fiction in Robinson Crusoe and its sequels

Everybody's story: Pamela as type

Conclusion.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781611493641

1611493641

9781611493658

161149365X

OCLC:

733232721