The Story-Shaped World: Fiction and Metaphysics : Some Variations on a Theme - Hardcover

Wicker, Brian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0268016690 ISBN 13: 9780268016692

Publisher: Univ of Notre Dame Pr, 1975

Synopsis

Story-telling, since its earliest beginnings, has drawn its power not simply from the intrinsic fascination of a skilful narrative but from the fact that human beings are compelled to make 'fictions' if they are to explain and come to terms with the world they experience. This holds true, as Mr Wicker shows in the course of a profound and wide-ranging enquiry, for the complex and often sophisticated novels and anti-novels of our own day just as much as for such tradional forms as myth and fairy-tale. The world remains 'story-shaped'. In the first theoretical part of the book, by a method linking Aristotelean ideas and some aspects of structuralism, the author explores the network of linguistic and other relationships which make it virtuallt impossible to discuss the pervasive role of 'metaphor' in fiction without introducing a metaphysical dimension to which the concepts of Causality, Nature and God are relevant. In the second part Mr Wicker shows how some of the themes revealed in part one work themselves out in the novels of Lawrence and Joyce, Waugh and beckett, Robbe-Grillet and Mailer. The book is interdisciplinary in character and purpose. In seeking to show that the relation of fact to fiction, of the real world to the world of story, is itself a kind of 'metaphysical pact', a secret to which the narrator's art is the metaphorical key, Mr Wicker deals with issues of no less importance to the philosopher and theologian than to the student of literature. The author is Senior Lecturer in English Literature in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies, University of Birmingham.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ of Notre Dame Pr
• Publication date: 1975
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0268016690
• ISBN 13: 9780268016692
• Binding: Hardcover