Skip to content
Home/ Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel
Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel

Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel

by Gingrich, Brian
No customer reviews yet ISBN 9780198858287 Oxford University Press

The Pace of Fiction redefines the literary history of the novel by analyzing its most elaborate feature: its pace. It moves from the rise of the novel to realism and modernism. It starts by tracing the evolution of two narrative units: scenes ("shown" slowly) and summaries ("told" swiftly). These units emerge from the conflict of epic and drama, gain shape in the commentaries of Fielding and Goethe, and become dynamically opposed in nineteenth-century realism. In Middlemarch, they rotate in regular sequence: summaries move swiftly until scenes slow them down; scenes play out dramatically until summaries sweep them forward; their movement imitates the conflict of fate and free will. Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, scenic impulses overtake summary storytelling. The reader sees the tendency already in Austen's dialogues, Hawthorne's tableaux, or Balzac's battering drama, and finds it in Jane Eyre's placement of summaries in private scenes. When Flaubert extends
scenic vividness to all of his summaries, and when Henry James subordinates his summaries to scenic consciousness, the extreme pressure of scene upon summary brings the opposition of realist pacing to collapse. But other oppositions arise in the modernisms that follow. In the alternation of stasis and kinesis, of drifting thoughts and everyday actions, of stories and acts of storytelling--in Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Mann, Hemingway--pace gathers and creates meaning in new ways.

About the author

Product details

BrandOxford University Press
Pub dateOct 25, 2021
ISBN-100198858280
ISBN-139780198858287
LanguageEnglish
Dimensions6.43 × 0.79 × 9.46 in
Weight1 lb
Last updated 2026-04-24 16:17
$121.00
In stock — ships in 24 hours with free tracking
Delivery by Monday, September 14, 2026
Qty
Sign in to Add to Saved list
Free delivery on orders over $35.
15-day returns. Any reason.
Secure checkout. We never store card details.

Readers who bought this also bought

More from Modern - 19th Century
See all
Oxford Handbook of Decadence
The meaning of <em>decadence</em> varies with context, depending on what (or who) is understood to have declined, decayed, or degenerated. These negative meanings are familiar from history (the decline and fall of Rome), sociology (the decay of communities), morality (the degeneration of values), and more, including such popular conceptions of decadence as excess and corruption. At the same time, all of this negative decadence has found positive cultural expression, principally in literature, through the work of such celebrated nineteenth-century decadents as Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and many others. This volume takes the study of decadence beyond these canonical literary works to explore the phenomenon in broader historical, geographical, and cultural contexts. <p/>In thirty-five chapters by esteemed scholars from a range of disciplines, the <em>Oxford Handbook of Decadence</em> addresses different critical periods, such as classical antiquity, various ages of empire, the interwar era in the twentieth century, and contemporary times, as well as key places--France, Belgium, Britain, Italy, Germany, the Nordic nations, Russia and Ukraine, the Ottoman Empire, and Japan--and such genres as the novel, the short story, drama, the essay, prose poetry, and film. The volume also considers decadence more broadly as a culture not limited to literature by tracing its manifestations in such material forms as book design, fashion, interior decoration, and architecture, as well as through the experiential register of the senses: decadent vision, sound, smell, taste, and touch are all reflected, respectively, in painting, music, perfume, cuisine, and feeling. Finally, the chapters explore the theoretical resonance of decadence in such fields as theology, science, ecology, politics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. By illuminating the various ways decadence can be construed, the Handbook offers an in-depth and original exploration into the paradox of decadence: a culture that draws its creative energy from the idea of decline.
$247.19
Moral Economies of American Authorship: Reputation, Scandal, and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Mar
Ryan, Susan M
$47.48
Common Precedents: The Presentness of the Past in Victorian Law and Fiction
Ben-Yishai, Ayelet
$44.18
Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons 1830-1870
Wright, Tom F
$142.95
Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress After Slavery
Laski, Gregory
$142.95
Nervous Stage: Nineteenth-Century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre (UK) (UK)
Smith, Matthew Wilson
$82.60