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

by Brian Wicker

Overview

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 traditional forms as myth and fairy-tale. The world remains ‘story-shaped'.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781472507846
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	05/08/2014
Series:	Bloomsbury Academic Collections: English Literary Criticism
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Brian Wicker was Senior Lecturer in English Literature in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies, University of Birmingham.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Metaphor and Metaphysics in Fiction
Part One: Theoretical
1 Metaphor and ‘Analogy'
2 Metaphor and ‘Fiction'
3 Metaphor and ‘Nature'
4 Metaphor and ‘God'
Notes to Part One
Part Two: Critical
Introductory
5 Lawrence and the Unseen Presences
6 Joyce and the Sense of an Ending
7 Waugh and the Narrator as Dandy
8 Beckett and the Death of the God-Narrator
9 Robbe-Grillet and the One-Dimensional Novel
10 Mailer and the Big Plot being hatched by Nature
Notes to Part Two
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index