Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Review: The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel, by Brian Gingrich

Review: The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel, by Brian Gingrich Reviews BRIAN GINGRICH, The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. ix þ 202. $84. In The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel, Brian Gingrich reframes classic problems of narrative struc- ture, arguing for pace—and not reference as such—as a master con- cept in the emergence of British realism. The book ranges from a comparativist discussion of the late eighteenth-century novel through the heightened moments that structure “epiphanic modern- ism” (p. 159). Offering a structural analysis of the way realist nar- rative manages temporal flow, Gingrich makes the case that realism as it emerges in the late eighteenth century is foundationally based on a tension between “scene” and “summary.” Gingrich highlights these terms from Gerard Genette’s Narrative Discourse, pointing out that they were demoted from a place of prominence in Mieke Bal’s Narratology in 2017. Gingrich recovers these terms in order to explain pace, which he identifies as a fundamental rhythm of nar- rative: enacted scenes are interspersed, to varying degrees, with sum- maries that transmit compressed information. What is initially a “segmentation” or “controlled mode of drifting” in the early nine- teenth century becomes, by its end, a captivated http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Nineteenth-Century Literature University of California Press

Review: The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel, by Brian Gingrich

Cohn, Elisha
Nineteenth-Century Literature , Volume 78 (4): 4 – Mar 1, 2024
Download PDF
4 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/university-of-california-press/review-the-pace-of-fiction-narrative-movement-and-the-novel-by-brian-STzOj3nJk0

References (0)

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
University of California Press
Copyright
© 2024 by The Regents of the University of California
ISSN
0891-9356
eISSN
1067-8352
DOI
10.1525/ncl.2024.78.4.316
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Reviews BRIAN GINGRICH, The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. ix þ 202. $84. In The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel, Brian Gingrich reframes classic problems of narrative struc- ture, arguing for pace—and not reference as such—as a master con- cept in the emergence of British realism. The book ranges from a comparativist discussion of the late eighteenth-century novel through the heightened moments that structure “epiphanic modern- ism” (p. 159). Offering a structural analysis of the way realist nar- rative manages temporal flow, Gingrich makes the case that realism as it emerges in the late eighteenth century is foundationally based on a tension between “scene” and “summary.” Gingrich highlights these terms from Gerard Genette’s Narrative Discourse, pointing out that they were demoted from a place of prominence in Mieke Bal’s Narratology in 2017. Gingrich recovers these terms in order to explain pace, which he identifies as a fundamental rhythm of nar- rative: enacted scenes are interspersed, to varying degrees, with sum- maries that transmit compressed information. What is initially a “segmentation” or “controlled mode of drifting” in the early nine- teenth century becomes, by its end, a captivated

Journal

Nineteenth-Century Literature – University of California Press

Published: Mar 1, 2024

There are no references for this article.