Narrative Framing in Contemporary American Novels

Download or read book Narrative Framing in Contemporary American Novels written by Sławomir Studniarz and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-11 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines a range of novels and novellas published over the course of nearly forty years, from 1968 to 2014, including E.L. Doctorow’s Andrew’s Brain, John Gardner’s “The King’s Indian,” Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium, Peter Straub’s Mr. X, and Joyce Carol Oates’ Expensive People. These texts display one crucial unifying thread: they are doubly-mediated fictions, fictions in parentheses, so to speak. The application of narrative framing and embedding has been commonly acknowledged and abundantly researched in various works belonging to the Western literary heritage. However, its use in the twentieth and twenty-first century fiction has not been adequately explored, perhaps with the exception of the literary creations of such giants as Vladimir Nabokov and John Barth. Despite this critical oversight, narrative frames prove to be a major resource for modern-day novelists, who adapt this literary device and very effectively put it to their own uses. The essays collected in this volume will serve to spark the revival of interest in this time-honored narrative tool, demonstrating its validity for research into more recently created novels.