EN 1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Indentured Servant, Ghost Story, The Unfortunate Traveller
EN 1001
June 13, 2018
Lecture 4
Fiction!
● Fiction is written in prose, whatever tools you use for prose, you can now use for
fiction
● You can use these tools for drama and poetry as well!
● Have to use the OED and look for other possible meanings
● Theme, topic, structure, movement, style, figures and tropes, what literary devices?
● What differentiates fiction from prose? Plot!
● Cause and effect, conflict
○ Conflict within the self
○ Conflict with idea
○ Conflict with environment
● Sustained development of characterization
○ Fiction is interested in the portrayal of human beings
● First fiction 1772: Moll Flanders
○ Fictional autobiography; starts as a seamstress working in indentured labour,
then realized that what is between her legs has market value. She then finds
a more sophisticated form of prostitution: marriage. She ends up marrying her
son.
○ Humanism; emerges in Shakespeare
○ Fiction emerges 200 years later with a similar psychological portrait
○ Fiction is about humankind
Prose and Fiction
● Tenor of discourse is the same: fiction is written in prose
● Both can have imagery, setting and characters BUT fiction has plot and conflict and
is imaginary (not fully real)
● Subgenre of fiction called realism
○ Charles Dickens would wait until 1am then wander into the toughest parts of
London and observe and talk to these people. Documented in his stories as
“realism”. If you read a Dickens novel you can follow the characters around
the city of London.
○ When you have a historical novel you have a bit of realism because it is set in
a historical event.
○ Just because it is realistic literature, doesn’t mean it is not imagined. All
literature is distorted. Based on real events.
○ We are always immersed in some sort of bias
○ A Marxist approach of literature is: every literary text is going to persuade us
on how great the bourgeois are and how horrible the working class are.
Fiction
● Short story, Novella and Novel.
● Short story is very short. Just short. It’s a relative term. A short story does not have
chapters.
● A novella is a short story with (sometimes) chapters, and an extended plot
● Novel: a full length narrative usually with multiple chapters
○ Used to be a bookstore are W. H. Smith. That bookstore made its debut at
railway stations in the 1800s. These railway stations would publish
weekly/monthly stories with one segments at a time. They discovered early
that you can sell these stories in installments. At the end of the run, they
would take all these weekly installments and put them into a book.
● Thomas Nashe The Unfortunate Traveller
Some Subgenres of Fiction
● Picaresque
○ Episodic in structure; thin on characterization and plot; usually about the
adventures of a rogue or commoner. Characters basically remain the same all
the way through.
■ Don Quixote: goes from one town, to the next, to the next. He doesn’t
fall into a relationship, he doesn’t get into trouble, it’s very light and not
challenging.
● Epistolary
○ Written in a letter form.
○ Dracula is written in this form: there are three different narrators writing
letters. You get different points of view.
○ You will get the same event written in three different letters in three points of
view.
○ Pamela: a woman who is an obsessive compulsive diary writer. She in naive
and believes that if she can keep her virginity she will remain pure.
● Detective novel
○ The triumph of the human mind: reason and knowledge over puzzles and
data.
○ Sherlock Holmes is not only an intelligent man, but an opium addict.
● Gothic
○ Must have elements of the supernatural. Frankenstein is not gothic. It is
science fiction. Ghost, vampire, werewolf, zombies.
○ Detective novel emerged from the gothic.
● Bildungsroman:
○ Coming of age
○ Stories of young people in their teens, morphing into adults, sort of both child
and adult at the same time. Sexuality and responsibility.
● Penny Dreadfuls
○ Start at the 1830s and 40s.
○ They would go into prison houses and wait for people waiting to be hanged,
then interview them. Then ask all the horrible things they did. They would take
that information and rework it into a story. Sold for a penny. Jack the Ripper
for example. Based on true stories but still imaginary.
Document Summary
Fiction is written in prose, whatever tools you use for prose, you can now use for fiction. You can use these tools for drama and poetry as well! Have to use the oed and look for other possible meanings. Fiction is interested in the portrayal of human beings. Fictional autobiography; starts as a seamstress working in indentured labour, then realized that what is between her legs has market value. She then finds a more sophisticated form of prostitution: marriage. Fiction emerges 200 years later with a similar psychological portrait. Tenor of discourse is the same: fiction is written in prose. Both can have imagery, setting and characters but fiction has plot and conflict and is imaginary (not fully real) Charles dickens would wait until 1am then wander into the toughest parts of. London and observe and talk to these people. If you read a dickens novel you can follow the characters around the city of london.
