CHARACTERS
SETTING
TIME
NARRATING AGENCY
FOCALIZATION AND VIEWPOINT
TROPES AND SYMBOLS
GENRES AND TONES
1. CHARACTERS
Literature has the ability to give life to characters and situations which empower the readers’ imaginations and imprint their memories, sometimes for their whole lives. Some characters succeed in appearing as real as any actually living person. Yet, one always has to bear in mind that characters are not real human beings but textual creations. Character study thus requires that the reader bring together the indications found throughout the text so as to determine the character’s major traits, his typical modes of behavior or response. Moreover, it is obvious that in a short passage for commentary, we have only a fleeting glimpse of the characters of the novel and we must be careful not to draw any hasty conclusions.
Disclosure or revelation of character can take place through direct telling (explanatory characterization = the narrator describes and evaluates the motives and dispositional qualities of the characters; he tells everything the reader should know about a character, especially about his or her moral standing) or through indirect showing (dramatic characterization = the reader will have to infer from the information shown and elaborate her / his representation of a character). However, some texts can combine telling and showing, intermingling direct and indirect information. In contemporary narratives, showing tends to displace telling so that readers are more and more asked to find signification in implicit indications such as the following ones.
1.1 Names and titles (onomastics)
Characters’ traits can be reinforced through the acoustic value (= the sonorities) of their names (ex: Harry Potter’s Professor Snape unites snap and snake, exemplifying the stern countenance and duplicity of the character), through their metaphorical value (Piggy, the fat boy in Lord of the Flies), through the semantic connection between the name and the behaviour of a character etc (ex: Stephen Dedalus in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man immediately conjures up the image of a maze and its magnificent complexity). The use of diminutives in certain contexts may point to familiarity or lower social standing. One should also pay attention to the choice of titles to refer to characters, as referring to a woman as Mrs or Madame, for instance, does not imply the same. Similarly, the use of full names instead of a title followed by a family name does not establish the same sense of proximity between reader and character, or the same implicit judgment. An eponymous novel is one which is named after its central character who is thus the eponymous hero or heroine.
1.2 Physical appearance and clothing
Characters are often described physically: the facial features (physiognomy), the shape of their bodies, the appearance and quality of their clothes, are presented as striking details that are not revealed at random but can be seen as an indirect indication of the character’s psychological make up and social background.
1.3 Speech
One has to question the grammaticality of a character’s speech (complexity of the syntactical structures, link-words…), the vocabulary (limited or varied, concrete or abstract, familiar or highflown…), the tone (serious, ironical, self-deprecating…) and the character’s ability to communicate. The study of how the characters speak is crucial insofar as it constitutes their very identity.
1.4 Actions
Gestures and movements, sometimes known as “kinesics” can be viewed as a substitute for words, adding to their psychological portrait. Habitual actions can also be indicators of a character’s psychology. A unique action on the other hand can highlight, by its contrasts with habits, a crucial change in character. Finally one should ask oneself whether a character is an agent or not.
1.5 Setting
It can also be an agent in the narrative affecting characters and have a causal function. Or it can reinforce analogically what has already been intimated about a character. Objects too can reveal hidden aspects of a character’s personality.
1.6 Flat and round characters
Characters can fulfill different functions and serve several purposes: they can be presented as individuals and refer primarily to themselves or as types and refer to larger classes. Typical characters, standing for abstract ideas or embodying social or historical situations, often require from the reader extratextual knowledge and are characteristic of didactic fiction, contrary to mimetic fiction. The distinction between “flat” (= stereotypical and static) characters, who are limited in their evolution and verismilitude, and “round” (= more complex and dynamic) characters was first introduced by English writer E.M. Forster. The confidant or confidante who provides the reader with information while avoiding direct address from the narrator was called a “ficelle” by American writer Henry James.
2. SETTING
The term “setting” denotes the location, historical period, and social surroundings in which the action of a text develops.
Setting can have an analogical function and complement the indirect showing of character or be in harmony with a character’s mood. For example the recurrent use of pathetic fallacy (or personification) in romantic fiction (when human emotions are projected onto phenomena of the natural world) may suggest hidden aspects of a character’s personality by attributing some of his / her qualities to the natural world. For example, passionate, romantic heroes are often set in the middle of a storm.
Setting also contributes to the building up of atmosphere. It is useful to ask oneself whether the scene takes place indoors or outdoors, whether the setting is open or closed, single or multiple, natural or manufactured, static or moving… The setting is at the crossroads between its referential function (situating where the story takes place, and what it looks like) and its symbolic potential (what it means implicitly, or what idea it reinforces metaphorically). American writer T.S. Eliot defined the symbolic properties of objects in settings in his novels as “objective correlatives” (he meant that the best way of expressiong emotions is not through a direct statement or description of that emotion, but through the objective description of an object, a situation, or events which will evoke the emotion for the reader). Indications of the weather or the elements (water, fire, air, earth) frequently have a symbolic or archetypal dimension as well as colours.
The referential function of setting also matters, that is to say the manner in which a setting contributes to a greater illusion of reality, a greater verisimilitude, for mimetic ( a particular setting) or didactic (a more stereotyped setting) purposes. One has to pay specific attention to place names: whether fictitious or real, they always mean something. Even when places do actually exist, like New York or Bombay, they are always chosen for their symbolic or stereotypical values.
3.TIME: THE FUNCTIONING OF TEMPORALITY IN NARRATIVE
The most basic consideration to make between time and text is about the date of publication and the moment of the actual writing of the story, which may differ. These pieces of information can be used to relate the problématique to historical matters or to schools of thought (such as naturalism, realism, post-modernism, romanticism, etc.).
A distinction has to be made between narrated time (the actual, real duration of the events related) and narrative time (the length of text devoted to relating the story)
3.1 Narrated time
It refers both to the length of time covered by the narrative which may vary from one day (ex: Mrs Dalloway) to several centuries or generations and to the historical period evoked in the narrative. Discerning this period is only a first step leading to a questioning of the relationship that might exist between this same period and that when it was written, or the period when it was read. This relationship can either facilitate or hinder the illusion of reality which determines the reader’s response to the text. Novels set in a distant past are less familiar or more exotic somehow than contemporary novels set in the present of the reader.
3.2 Narrative time
It is necessary to note the different time-markers (order, frequency and duration).
3.2.1 Order
Anachronies (part of a text that is told at a point which is earlier or later than its natural or logical position in the event sequence) are a common feature in narratives and can be divided between analepses (flashbacks in time) and prolepses (flashforwards).
Analepsis (analepses in the plural) or retroversion can fulfill a dramatic function by postponing a solution, while at the same time dropping hints as to a possible solution. It can also be seen as part of character creation, a kind of short cut which will illustrate a particular character trait or underline the irrationality of inner life and memorization as in the stream of consciousness technique. We can distinguish between external analepsis (refers to events beyond the time span of the text) and internal analepsis (flashes back to an event already encapsulated in the text)
Prolepsis (whether external or internal), also referred to as anticipation or foreshadowing decompresses a situation and replaces the joy of suspense in the reader’s mind by the joy of discovery. It pushes the reader into revising his or her assumptions on the story during the actual reading process.
3.2.2 Frequency
It is the number of times a specific event occurs in a story in relation to the number of times it is narrated. Analysis of frequency can indicate that an event is foregrounded and can therefore have a dramatic function. Frequency can also be a means of furthering narrative complexity when for instance the same event is narrated several times by different characters, creating greater textual richness.
3.2.3 Duration
Study of duration is the study of the pace of the narrative (length of text devoted to an event – number of lines, paragraphs or pages -) and actual duration in the story (minutes, hours, days…) and concerns the different narrative techniques used to accelerate and decelerate. Acceleration comes about when a short section of the text covers a long period of the story, and deceleration when a long section covers a short temporal span. Ellipsis represents maximum acceleration where almost no textual space is devoted to a long period of time. There is a gap in the narrated time. Opposed to this is the pause where a long section of the text covers no story duration at all, as in purely descriptive passages or when the narrator comments upon a situation. Summary is a form of narrative compression whereby a given story period is reduced to its main features. It enables the reader to digest information essential to the rest of the narrative very quickly. In scene on the other hand there is a high degree of identity between the length of the text and the story duration. Stretch qualifies what happens when narrative time is longer than narrated time, a device which slows down the rhythm and is often used to create suspense for instance.
In certain cases, time itself is foregrounded becoming the subject of the text, giving rise to the designation of certain novels as “time-novels”. In such works, considerations of order, frequency, and duration are subservient to the author’s desire to express a theory and philosophy of time.
4. NARRATING AGENCY (the voice telling the story)
4.1 Identification of the narrator
This pre-supposes consideration of the narrator in relation to the author and to the reader. Unlike the real author who has a physical existence, the narrator, like the characters, is a construct only brought into being by the text. He is a fictitious entity and he can be seen as a link between two real people, author and reader. There is sometimes a tendency to mistake the narrator for the real author. However, there can be a considerable difference between the real author’s ideology or political commitment in real life and the narrator’s ideology. The “implied author” of the text is “the creative mind implied by the existence of the text” (Lodge), an ideal created version of the real man. The author as staged within the story must not be mistaken with the real author.
The notion of reader is just as complicated. One must distinguish between the real persons reading a novel (that the real author never gets to know personally) and the “reader” who is sometimes mentioned or even indirectly interpellated in some works of fiction, who is imagined by the narrator of the story. This second “reader” (usually called the narratee or implied reader) is a mere linguistic sign and belongs to the fictional world. Whether consciously or unconsciously, all writers address a certain group of potential readers selected because they belong to, for instance, a certain age, group, social class, time, or race… The real reader is no fool and understands, sometimes not without amusement, that the implied reader and him- or herself are two distinct people.
4.2 TYPES OF NARRATION
4.2.1 Pure narrative and discourse
French linguist Emile Benveniste distinguishes between pure narratives and discourse.
Pure narrative is typical of narratives dealing with past events. This form of narration is characterized by the use of certain tenses (the simple past mainly), pronouns (third person pronouns) and deictics disconnected from the situation of utterance (“there” and “then” for example) and is thus best suited to writers such as historians who aim at perfect objectivity and need to avoid any type of personal judgement in their account of past events. The presence of a narrative voice can hardly be felt. On the contrary discourse is characterized by certain verbal forms, such as presents, perfects, and modal forms, but also by the presence of first and second pronouns as well as by deictics referring to the situation of utterance such as “here” and “now”. But the apparently objective quality of a text does not mean that there is no narrator to tell the story: far from it, there is always a teller in the tale, however discreet, and any utterance presupposes someone who has uttered it. No proper objectivity can therefore be achieved in text, as there is always a degree of subjectivity and a writer or speaker responsible for the text.
4.2.2 Extradiegetic / intradiegetic narrators
The position of the narrator in relation to the telling of the story proper (the diegesis) also matters. One can distinguish between extradiegetic narrators who do not take part in the diegesis and intradiegetic (= within the story) narrators who take part in it. Yet, such a distinction is easier to apply to whole novels than to short excerpts.
4.2.3 Heterodiegetic / homodiegetic narrators
A more fruitful criterion when one has to study shorter passages is the relationship between the narrator and the characters. Whenever the narrator is also a character, the narration is said to be “character-bound” or homodiegetic. This often coincides with narration using the first-person pronoun “I” which can fulfill two different functions which are those of the “I”-narrator telling the story (and seemingly responsible for its production) and the “I”-character who can appear as the object upon which the discourse focuses. When on the contrary, the narrator does not intervene in the story as a character, the narration is said to be heterodiegetic.
4.2.4 Ulterior / simultaneous / anterior narration
The most traditional configuration is that the narrator tells a story that is supposed to have taken place before: this is ulterior narration and it is usually coupled with the use of past tenses. Yet the use of the simple past is not enough in itself to indicate ulterior narration. In some cases, past tenses may on the contrary give the illusion of simultaneity. Most often though the illusion of simultaneous narration (the story is related as it is happening) is given by the repeated use of present tenses. This type of narration offers a very lively account of the story and gives an impression of spontaneity. Anterior narration, though much less frequent, is usually characterized by a systematic use of future tenses. The narration announces events to come. It has a prophetic tone or relies on detailed prolepses. It is not rare however to identify these three types of narration in given texts.
4.3 THE ROLE AND FUNCTIONS OF THE NARRATOR
· The narrator’s role can be reduced to merely saying what happens. In this case, the narrator’s presence is almost imperceptible.
· The narrator can establish a spatio-temporal setting. This is the descriptive function mentioned previously.
· In some texts, the narrator also comments upon the characters’ attitudes, constantly digressing from the description of what they do or say to the analysis of their behavior. Narratorial intervention then contributes to direct characterization while reducing the reader’s freedom of interpretation.
· As is often the case in didactic fiction, the narrator may use the characters’ individual lives to put forward a much more general message. The characters then serve as a foil to narrator’s discourse which is foregrounded.
Narratorial comments may also include allusions to the act of narration itself (metatextuality)
· Direct interpellations such as “Reader”, “dear reader” establish a different relationship between the narrator and the actual reader and often indicate the kind of implied reader the author has in mind.
· Presentation of speech and thoughts can take at least five different forms:
- Direct presentation of speech or thoughts. This mode of presentation is characterized by the presence of inverted commas and of a reporting clause. The narrator then is independent from the characters. Yet he remains in the background and the character is foregrounded. However, the reporting verb can bear some degree of subjectivity.
Ex: “What are these vast buildings?” she wondered.
- Free direct presentation of speech or thoughts. This time both the inverted commas and the reporting clause have disappeared. The character himself is speaking, thus becoming the only narrator.
Ex: what are these vast buildings?
- Indirect presentation of speech or thoughts. The character’s words or thoughts are totally subordinated to the narrator’s own words. Indirect speech places the narrator to the fore.
Ex: “she wondered […]”
- Free indirect presentation of speech or thoughts. This is a complex mixture of direct style (the interrogative form is still there) and indirect style (use of past tenses). As there is no reporting clause, the narrator’s presence can hardly be perceived and the emphasis is on the character whose voice can be heard distinctly.
Ex: What were those vast buildings?
- Narrative report of speech or thoughts acts. Here the character’s words or thoughts are not really reported to the reader, they are merely summed up by the narrator who is in the foreground. The reader is left to imagine what words were actually used by the characters who in turn tend to disappear in the narration itself.
Ex: She wondered about those buildings.
4.4 NARRATING AGENCY VERSUS READER RESPONSE
In general, homodiegetic narrators are felt to be closer to the reader than their heterodiegetic counterparts, simply because there is no narrator standing between the reader and the character and hindering the process of identification. The use of free direct or free indirect discourse also facilitates identification, as the reader suddenly feels s/he is placed within the character’s mind. The same remark applies to simultaneous narration which contributes to making identification with the characters easier. This in turn has numerous consequences:
- Any narrative technique that has the effect of reducing the distance between the reader and the characters can be used to further characterization. Indeed, as seen previously, the way a character speaks can reveal character traits, so that choosing between two different modes of presentation of speech also implies choosing between two modes of characterization.
- This reduction of the distance can also contribute to dramatization, since the reader is encouraged to live vicariously (= through somebody else) and thus get involved in the story.
On the contrary, whenever an obtrusive heterodiegetic narrator keeps intervening in the story, the distance between the reader and the characters increases:
- This enables the author to invite the reader to be critical.
- As a result this narrative technique can often be found in the type of ironical text in which the reader is supposed to feel superior to the characters and laugh at them.
The author sometimes decides to use several narrators, proceeding for instance from an heterodiegetic to an homodiegetic narrator etc. One of the narrators may turn out to be totally unreliable. Such shifts greatly contribute to textual richness and generate the “polyphony” or “polyvocality” of the novel.
Narration is really at the core of textual analysis, the most powerful and the most complex of all the structuring principles of fiction.
5. FOCALIZATION
5.1 FOCALIZATION VERSUS NARRATION: WHO SEES? WHO TELLS?
The question of the narrator’s place and identity has to be differentiated from that of who actually perceives what is at stake in the story. Studying the role of the narrator answers the question “who tells?” whereas the study of focalization answers that of “who sees?”
5.2 FOCALIZATION VERSUS POINT OF VIEW
The notion of focalization in literary analysis is distinct from that of point of view: the latter is only about the knowledge of the situation, whereas focalization is about the very perception of the situation through one’s senses. When you take a given point of view, you gather knowledge about it and try to make a specific picture. Focalization is more than that as it is essentially about perceiving, sensing the situation: it is not intellectual but properly sensory. The focalizer is the entity (character, animal, object or other) that perceives the origin of the perception. The focalized is the object of perception, what is perceived.
5.3 FOCALIZER
5.3.1 INTERNAL / EXTERNAL FOCALIZATION, FOCALIZATION 0
Either the focalizer can be located or s/he cannot. If located then two other possibilities appear, either the focalizer is a character inside the story, in which case there is internal focalization, or the focalizer is an heterodiegetic narrator not taking part in the diegesis but witnessing the scene from a precise place, in which case there is external focalization. If, on the other hand the focalizer cannot be identified, if s/he does not seem to be watching from any precise place, then there is zero focalization. Zero Focalization is often combined with an omniscient narrator.
5.3.2 MULTIPLE FOCALIZERS
There may be several focalizers in a narrative, and several types of focalization woven together. It is frequent even in short excerpts.
5.3.3 POSITION OF FOCALIZER
Whenever the focalizer is localized it is necessary to determine the situation of the focalizer to the focalized: is there distance or proximity? Are there changes in perspective or not? Is the focalizer behind, in front, above, below the focalized? Such details may fulfill a symbolic function. When the focalizer looks up at someone then admiration may be implied, whereas looking down may imply contempt.
Temporal considerations also enter into the analysis of the distance between focalizer and focalized. Focalization not of what is seen but of what is remembered or imagined enters into the category of what we would call mental focalization.
Generalisations concerning the effects of different uses of focalization have often turned out to be erroneous. For example, internal focalization is not necessarily more subjective. It is equally impossible to draw universal conclusions from the relation narrator-focalizer. What this tends to prove is that focalization must be studied case by case and in context. What has to be examined is the relations between narrator (who narrates), focalizer (who sees), and the focalized (what is being seen) which are all based on contiguity (the degree of proximity of narrator to focalizer to focalized), which, in turn, establishes relations of similarity (closeness or consonance) or opposition (distance of dissonance) between narrator and focalizer, narrator and focalized, focalizer and focalized.
Focalization often contributes to characterization. In internal focalization the reader is given information about the focalized itself and about the focalizer. Besides, the character-focalizer has a technical advantage over the other characters. The reader watches with the character’s eyes, which, by facilitating identification, makes the reader closer to the character.
6. TROPES AND SYMBOLS
Symbols and tropes such as metonymies and metaphors make words or phrases take on new significance and meaning, enabling the passage from literal to figurative meaning. There are numerous figures of speech that one may learn in class or in specialized books but what matters in a literary commentary are explanations: you must always make it clear that you perfectly understand what you are talking about.
6.1 METONYMY
Metonymy (“name change” in Ancient Greek) relies on contiguity, whether spatial (Liverpool for Liverpool football team), or simply logical (Shakespeare for the works of Shakespeare. One term is substituted for another with which it would normally be associated. This substitution takes place along the syntagmatic axis, and functions in the same way as what Freud called a displacement in a dream, where for example an object which is normally associated with one particular person, is seen actually taking the place of that person.
One may distinguish between different types of metonymies: those that substitute the object containing for what is contained (a cup of tea), what is possessed for the person possessing (a uniform for a person), or a place for what is produced in that place or for the persons living in it. A particular form of the metonymy is the synecdoche, whereby a part of something is used to signify the whole, or (more rarely) the whole is used to signify a part. Indirect characterization owes much to these two “contiguity tropes”. A character’s clothes, or the setting in which s/he appears, while informing the reader about his/her traits, may be viewed as metonymic or synecdochic substitutes for the whole person, thus re-inforcing textual coherence. This trope has often been associated with realist writing.
6.2 METAPHOR
Metaphor tends to be mistaken for simple comparisons, also called similes. Similes are figures in which one thing is likened to another (“like” is thus often used in such cases). Metaphor etymologically means “carrying from one place to another” and is a figure of speech in which one thing is described in terms of another (for example, the rose that stands for a beloved woman).
Metaphors seem to operate on two semantic levels:
- They all contain some sort of semantic inconsistency, a seemingly illogical juxtaposition of terms belonging to different semantic fields.
- But, at a deeper level, the different terms making up a metaphor always have one seme (the lowest-level element of signification) in common. Understanding a metaphor then requires a complex mental operation. The metaphor bears some resemblance to what since Freud has been called the condensation process in a dream, whereby several places or persons with at least one feature in common may turn out to be represented by just one place or on person. Thus the metaphor, forcing the reader through its very polysemy to grasp two levels of signification in one mental act, contributes to a considerable enrichment of meaning.
6.3 SYMBOL
Like metaphors, symbols usually rely on some kind of analogy and involve several layers of signification. The Greek etymology of the term means sign, token or emblem. Through the symbolization process, what in normal usage is seen as a signified becomes a signifier , which in turn gives birth to a second signified. For example, the object “clock” can become a signifier for a more abstract signified: Time. Yet the symbol differs from the metaphor in two essential ways: firstly it seems a metaphor one half of which remains unstated and indefinite, and can give rise to different interpretations, and secondly, unlike the metaphor, it does not always contain any semic inconsistency. If the symbol entails any form of discontinuity, it is not, as in metaphor at the level of the signifiers, but at the level of the signified. In other words, even if a symbol is not recognized as such, it remains endowed with sense.
It is through context that the symbol reveals itself as such, and it is through context that it can acquire its full significance. The term “context” here can have two different meanings: it can either designate the inter and extra-textual knowledge required to make sense of a particular symbol, or simply that part of text surrounding the would-be symbolic term, what some critics call the “co-text”.
The archetypal symbols, which are related to the fundamental facts of human existence such as birth, sexuality, death, etc and can be seen as the universal products of the collective unconscious, can indeed be easily recognized and interpreted through intertextual knowledge and extratextual experience. Private symbols, on the contrary, only make sense in relation to the co-text. For example the symbolic term may catch the reader’s attention because it is foregrounded through lexical repetition or semic accumulation. Sometimes too, the figurative, symbolic phrase is associated with more abstract terms, meant to draw the reader’s attention to its symbolic quality. Last but not least, the reader will start looking for a symbolic interpretation whenever the literal meaning is felt to be insufficient or inadequate.
Not only can particular terms or images be turned into symbols, but any constituent part of a narrative can be symbolic: actions, places, characters, or even the whole structure of a work, either in terms of its symmetry, thematic recurrence, or circularity. Because of this polymorphism, the symbol has the power to put parts of a literary work together in the service of the whole. The movement to the symbolic mode can only come about through reader implication. To detect the presence of symbols and discover their potential meaning, the reader cannot be content with a linear analytical reading but must be able to bring together separate elements so as to have an overall synthetical view of the text. A symbolic interpretation also requires from the reader a movement from the particular details of a story to more general and abstract meaning.
6.4 HYPERBOLES AND UNDERSTATEMENTS
A hyperbole is an exaggeration. Ex: “I haven’t seen you for ages”.
Both euphemisms and litotes are understatements (a way to minimize something, to present it as less than is the case). A euphemism, from the Greek “fair speech”, replaces a harsh expression by a pleasant one, such as “to pass away” for “to die” or the “lower-classes” for “the poor”. A litotes, derived from the Greek for “single or simple”, is the opposite of a hyperbole: it expresses a positive assertion with a negative phrase: “not bad” for “excellent” for instance.
7. GENRES AND TONES
7.1 GENRES
Sometimes authors blend genres and tones and play on several registers simultaneously. The following definitions have to be perfectly known.
7.1.1 THE PICARESQUE NOVEL
It borrowed its name from a 16th century Spanish type of character, the archetype of a clever rogue. The picaro is generally low-born and unscrupulous: he exploits the rich and the poor with no second thoughts and despises grander values like honour, morality or friendship. The modern characters of the trickster or hustler have a lot in common with the ancient figure of the picaro, who typically makes satirical comments on the dominant social order and questions established beliefs and traditions. The picaresque codes influenced modern writers such as Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding or Mark Twain.
7.1.2 THE SENTIMENTAL NOVEL
It is somehow the negative image of the picaresque genre: centred around virtuous women, these works relate how sensible and sensitive heroines stick to a strict moral code of honour and resist attempts to be dishonoured or married to unworthy suitors. Some works by writers like Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne illustrate the genre.
7.1.3 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS
It closely observes and exhibits the very gestures, customs and traditions of some strata of society. Social conventions are staged and illustrated through characters who react and understand them differently. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby exemplify the genre.
7.1.4 THE GOTHIC NOVEL
It explores the wild and the irrational through aesthetics that conjure up an idealized version of the Middle Ages. A sense of suspense is elaborated throughout sceneries of dense and mysterious forests and ancient castles. Ghosts and anguish constitute the key elements of the Gothic novel, which was written to make the reading public shudder. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto was the first proper Gothic novel, which inspired numerous authors: elements of Gothic can thus be found in Emily Brontë’s works, as in those of Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy.
7.1.5 EPISTOLARY NOVELS
They are made up of successive letters, a technique that allows the narrator-author to completely disappear behind the characters. Novels like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein exemplify the genre.
7.1.6 DIARY NOVELS
They are a variation of epistolary novels, the main difference being that the character-diarist shares his or her inmost feelings or reactions with the reader in the form of dated entries. The writing of diary novels somehow pertains to the technique of interior monologue.
7.1.7 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL
It is an imagined reconstruction of historical periods, which may involve both real and fictitious characters. English writer Walter Scott is mostly known for having popularized the genre.
7.1.8 THE MODERN ROMANCE
It bridges social realism with a more lyrical way to write. The Brontë sisters, D.H. Lawrence, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville or William Faulkner are all representatives of romanticism, which focuses on the study of ideal but flat characters (predictable characters with a simplified personality) experiencing strong emotions.
7.1.9 THE NOVEL OF FORMATION OR BILDUNGSROMAN (from German, “novel of education”)
It relates the very development of one character, from an early age to maturity. The passage from innocence to experience is the node / crux (centre point) of the plot. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations exemplify the genre.
7.2 TONES
The notion of tone is essentially vocal and primarily refers to oral speech. Texts may however reflect a tone, which is the expression of the attitude of the speaker or narrator.
· Ironic tone / Irony : irony comes from the Greek word “dissimulation”. It consists in communicating a different meaning than that actually implied at the literal level.
· Cynical tone / cynicism: when you express the opinion that other people are insincere and merely faking benevolence and altruism, you are being cynical.
· Sarcastic tone / sarcasm: it is a praise that actually condemns, for example if you ell someone who just broke something “well done!”.
· Satiric tone / satire: it is aimed at making ideas or people ridiculous. Satire implies a strong condemnation of the thing ridiculed and always shares elements of an implicit morality.
· Derogatory tone: a comment or remark showing strong disapproval and not showing respect is derogatory.
· Of course there are a lot of other useful words to define tone. These are just a few examples: aloof, amused, apologetic, bitter, carefree, cheerful, confident, contemptuous, determined, disrespectful, gloomy, harsh, inquisitive, judgmental, matter-of-fact, nostalgic, patronizing, skeptical, sympathetic, worried, etc.