Foreground Description in Prose Fiction: Fine Cross-literary Studies (THEORY/CULTURE) - Hardcover

Lopes, Jose Manuel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802007279 ISBN 13: 9780802007278

Publisher: University of Toronto Press, 1995

Synopsis

Within the large, diverse body of criticism devoted to the novel, there has been remarkably little attention paid to a key facet of prose fiction - the descriptive passage. While discourse linguists have produced useful studies of description, they have generally adhered to a plot-centred, action-driven model, designating as `background material' that which does not propel narrative time.

In this wide-ranging study, JosT Manuel Lopes proposes a theoretical framework for analysing the role of description in prose fiction. He offers readings of texts drawn from four national literatures - French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilian - testing his model across a cultural and temporal spectrum.

Lopes applies his model to detailed readings of Emile Zola's Une Page d'amour, Claude Simon's Histoire, Benito PTrez Gald3/4s' La de Bringas, CornTlio Penna's A Menina Morta, and Carlos de Oliveira's Finisterra. In addition to exploring the interplay of description and narration, these readings pay particular attention to spatial descriptions, and analyse the diverse roles of description in different contexts. After subjecting each fictional text to a detailed analysis which seeks to bring out the crucial aspects that contribute towards the foregrounding of descriptive passages (e.g., mise en abyme, parody, modes of representation), and which establishes, on occasion, certain relations that literary description may entertain with the other arts, he attempts to isolate the primary functions of foregrounding descriptions. What he seeks to demonstrate is that description constitutes a major textual component necessary for the analysis and understanding of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century fictional texts.

About this title

About the Author

Jose Manuel Lopes is a post-doctoral fellow in the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802007279
• ISBN 13: 9780802007278
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 216