short stories novels and essays are all forms of prose

Short Fiction Forms: Novella, Novelette, Short Story, and Flash Fiction Defined

When it comes to fiction, a short narrative can be found in many forms, from a slim book to just a few sentences. Short fiction forms can generally be broken down based on word count. The guidelines in this article can help you understand how short fiction is commonly defined. There are, however, no exact universal rules that everyone agrees upon, especially when it comes to flash fiction. When submitting your work for publication or contest entry, you should follow the specifications or submission guidelines. With that in mind, here's a list of short fiction forms and their definitions.

A work of fiction between 20,000 and 49,999 words is considered a novella. Once a book hits the 50,000 word mark, it is generally considered a novel. (However, a standard novel is around 80,000 words, so books between 50,000 to 79,999 words may be called short novels.) A novella is the longest of the short fiction forms, granting writers freedom for an expanded story, descriptions, and cast of characters, but still keeping the condensed intensity of a short story. Modern trends generally seem to be moving away from publishing novellas. Novellas are more commonly published as eBooks in specific genres, especially romance, sci-fi, and fantasy.

A novelette falls in the range of 7,500 to 19,999 words. The term once implied a book that had a romantic or sentimental theme, but today a novelette can be any genre. While some writers still use the term novelette, others might prefer to simply call it a short novella or long short story. Like the novella, a novelette may be difficult to pitch to an agent, but might work better as an eBook in niche genres.

Short story

Short stories fall in the range of about 1,000 to 7,499 words. Due to its brevity, the narrative in a short story is condensed, usually only focusing on a single incident and a few characters at most. A short story is self-contained and is not part of a series. When a number of stories are written as a series it's called a story sequence. Short stories are commonly published in magazines and anthologies, or as collections by an individual author.

Flash fiction

Flash fiction is generally used as an umbrella term that refers to super short fiction of 1,000 words or less, but still provides a compelling story with a plot (beginning, middle, and end), character development, and usually a twist or surprise ending. The exact length of flash fiction isn't set, but is determined by the publisher.

Types of flash fiction

There are many new terms that further define flash fiction. For example, terms like short shorts and sudden fiction are used to describe longer forms of flash fiction that are more than 500 words, while microfiction refers to the shortest forms of flash fiction, at 300 to 400 words or less. Here are some of the types of flash fiction:

Sudden fiction/Short short stories

The terms sudden fiction and short short stories refer to longer pieces of flash fiction, around 750 to 1,000 words. However, the definition varies and may include pieces up to 2,000 words, such as in the series that helped popularize the form, Sudden Fiction and New Sudden Fiction .

Postcard fiction

Postcard fiction is just what it sounds like—a story that could fit on a postcard. It's typically around 250 words, but could be as much as 500 or as few as 25. An image often accompanies the text to create the feeling of looking at a postcard, with the reader turning it over to read the inscription on the back.

Microfiction/Nanofiction

Microfiction and nanofiction describe the shortest forms of flash fiction, including stories that are 300 words or less. Microfiction includes forms such as drabble, dribble, and six-word stories.

Drabble is a story of exactly 100 words (not including the title). Just because the form is short doesn't mean you can skimp on the basics of a good story. It should have a beginning, middle, and end, and include conflict and resolution. You can read examples of drabbles at 100WordStory.org .

Dribble/Mini-saga

When writing a drabble isn't challenging enough, you can try your hand at writing a dribble, which is a story told in exactly 50 words.

Six-word stories

Ready to boil down a story and squeeze out its essence? Try writing a six-word story. It's not easy, but it's possible to write a complete story with conflict and resolution in six words, according to flash fiction enthusiasts. The most well-know example of a six-word story, often misattributed to Ernest Hemingway , is, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." The story evokes deep emotion, causing the reader to ponder the circumstances that brought the character to post the advertisement. You can read more examples of six-word stories on Narrative Magazine's website (with a free account), which are more carefully selected, or you can browse user-submitted stories on Reddit . Some authors also write flash nonfiction, composing six-word memoirs .

Short Fiction Challenge

Now that you are more familiar with some of the forms of short fiction, why not give it a try? Flash fiction can provide a helpful change of pace and help fine tune your writing skills. The limited word count forces you to consider the weight of every action, every character, and every word. Writing good short fiction takes time and practice. Sometimes it's the shortest pieces that can take the longest to write.

• Literary Fiction

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Definition of Prose

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.

Common Examples of First Prose Lines in Well-Known Novels

The first prose line of a novel is significant for the writer and reader. This opening allows the writer to grab the attention of the reader, set the tone and style of the work, and establish elements of setting , character, point of view , and/or plot . For the reader, the first prose line of a novel can be memorable and inspire them to continue reading. Here are some common examples of first prose lines in well-known novels:

Examples of Famous Lines of Prose

Prose is a powerful literary device in that certain lines in literary works can have a great effect on readers in revealing human truths or resonating as art through language. Well-crafted, memorable prose evokes thought and feeling in readers. Here are some examples of famous lines of prose:

Types of Prose

Difference between prose and poetry.

Many people consider prose and poetry to be opposites as literary devices . While that’s not quite the case, there are significant differences between them. Prose typically features natural patterns of speech and communication with grammatical structure in the form of sentences and paragraphs that continue across the lines of a page rather than breaking. In most instances, prose features everyday language.

Writing a Prose Poem

Prose edda vs. poetic edda, examples of prose in literature, example 1: the grapes of wrath by john steinbeck.

A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.

Example 2: This Is Just to Say by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold

Example 3: Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Synonyms of Prose

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What Is Prose In Literature? 7 Top Prose Examples

What is prose in literature ? Discover our expert guide with helpful prose examples and learn about the most impactful prose you can find in the literary world today.

Prose is any writing in an ordinary language without a rhyme scheme or formal metrical structure . Prose can take many forms, including short stories, poetry, and essays. When completing a prose piece, the organization of the words is essential to create a path the reader can follow. Still, there’s no need for lines to be of equal length or consider alliteration or other literary devices.

Prose follows the standard format of using sentences to build paragraphs. There’s a good chance your favorite novel, poem, or speech was written in prose format, as prose is the most common form of writing. When editing for grammar, we also recommend taking the time to improve the readability score of a piece of writing before publishing or submitting it. You might also be wondering, what is an iambic pentameter ?

Different Types Of Prose

Short stories, prose poetry, heroic prose, prose fiction and nonfictional prose, newspaper articles, key elements of prose literature, 1. great expectations by charles dickens, 2. the catcher in the rye by j.d. salinger, 3. the masque of the red death by edgar allan poe, 4. the hunger games by suzanne collins, 5. a tree grows in brooklyn by betty smith, 6. as you like it by william shakespeare, 7. the war of the worlds by h.g. wells.

While prose is common and easy to find in literature, there are several categories into which prose can fall. Read our guide with writing advice from authors to build your writing confidence.

Many authors write in prose for short stories, allowing their characters to explain the story to the reader in ordinary language. Writing in prose can make it easier for readers to understand literary work. The familiar, everyday speech that prose-style short stories take on allows the author to focus on telling the story from their character’s point of view, helping readers understand their story’s world.

It can be challenging for poets to convey their ideas when they’re working to stick to a particular rhyme scheme, worrying about line breaks, or struggling to fit their work into a certain number of stanzas. Writing prose, free verse, and poetry allows poets to share their ideas in a way that makes sense to them and their readers rather than following a format set up by someone else.

This type of prose poem is meant to be passed down through oral tradition. Heroic prose tells the story of a key figure in a culture’s present or history and helps to ensure that a culture’s values are passed from one generation to the next.

The difference between prose fiction and nonfictional prose is simple: fiction tells stories created in the author’s imagination, while nonfiction prose tells stories of events in real life. Both types of prose can follow the natural flow of speech, making it easy for the reader to follow the storyline.

Newspaper articles are often written in prose, with the reporter telling the story as it unfolded in real life, using language that follows how people usually speak.

Check out our canonical literature explainer.

When writing prose, it’s essential to consider the key elements that will help bring your narrative to life for your reader. Whether you’re writing an article, a short story, a novel, a poem, or other types of writing, paying attention to the key elements of prose will allow your reader to imagine the world you’re creating with your writing entirely. Key elements of prose include: 

• Character : Character development helps readers understand who plays a role in your story. While main character development is vital, you’ll also want to flesh out the other characters in your prose to help your readers understand how they interact. Be sure to help your reader see how your character grows and changes over time. There’s no need for your characters to stay stagnant–growth is a normal part of life, and working to show your readers how their experiences affect their personality and outlook on life can help them seem more real.
• Setting: Your reader needs to fully be able to picture the world you’re creating in your writing. Pay attention to what you see when you imagine your character’s world, and take plenty of time to describe their environment to your reader. Whether you’re describing a place that currently exists or a world that only exists in your imagination, developing the setting of your story can help your readers feel like they’re there, going through each experience you describe for your characters.
• Plot: Your plot is your storyline, and you’ll want to work carefully to be sure that your plot follows a clear path. When developing your plot, keep an eye out for plot holes, such as a character struggling with money suddenly being able to go on vacation. The more realistic your plot, the better your reader can identify with your story. 
• Point of View: Decide whether you want to tell your story from a first-person, second-person, or third-person point of view. Many prose writers use the first-person point of view, allowing the characters to speak directly to the reader. 
• Mood: What feeling do you want your readers to have as they enjoy your story? Perhaps you want them to feel inspired, or you want them to feel conflicted as they consider the hard truths that your character has to face as they grow and learn. The setting, character development, vocabulary choices, and writing style can all help your reader feel the mood you’re creating with your writing. 

Examples Of Prose In Literature

In this passage, Dickens expertly conveys one of the many difficulties of growing up–the fear of becoming someone you do not want to be. Many growing adults cling to the safety of youth, only to be overcome by the difficulties of adulthood that lead them to participate in the same behaviors they despise. Dickens’ prose writing style makes this passage relatable to readers, as they can feel the main character, Pip, baring his soul.

“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape.” – Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

One of the many reasons Catcher is renowned as a classic is Salinger’s ability to convey protagonist Holden Caulfield’s thoughts to the reader clearly (but not concisely). Caulfield shares his story like many people find their inner voice working–taking tangents and roundabouts, exploring new ideas, and returning to old ideas. As a result, many readers feel they know Caulfield by the end of the novel, even though he’s a fictional character created by Salinger’s imagination.

“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Known for creating macabre worlds that infuse readers’ nightmares, Poe’s ability to use everyday language to paint a clear picture continues to be envied by writers. In Masque, Poe helps the reader to understand the extravagance of the party he attends. The author’s detailed description leaves the reader with no questions about the party, allowing them to picture precisely how the scene appeared as partygoers met their brutal final fate.

“There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion, even by the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made.” Edgar Allan Poe , The Masque of the Red Death

Moviegoers and book lovers alike are familiar with the plight of Katniss, the heroine of The Hunger Games series. In this passage, near the beginning of the series, readers get to know their protagonist and relate to her, similar to getting to know a real-life friend. 

Katniss describes struggles in school, family issues, and trying to hide her true feelings, all shared by many. Collins’ use of prose makes it simple for readers to put themselves in the shoes of Katniss.

“And then he gives me a smile that just seems so genuinely sweet with just the right touch of shyness that unexpected warmth rushes through me.” Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

The coming-of-age tale of a young New York girl is a testament to the strength of the human spirit. Smith expertly makes the reader feel as if the tree is a character in the story and returns to this metaphor several times throughout the novel.

The book’s protagonist, Francie Nolan, shares characteristics with the trees that survive in the harsh Brooklyn environment. In this novel, the protagonist does not speak directly to the reader. However, Smith writes so readers feel like they’re listening to a friend describe their life and hardships. 

“Look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.” Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Shakespeare is one of the most prominent writers of all time, so he has many great examples of prose in literature . Skillfully using language to underscore social distinctions in his plays, he strategically uses prose and verse to show social status in As You Like It . 

Characters from lower social classes typically communicate using prose, which is used to portray their unpretentious and straightforward mannerisms. In contrast, the upper class uses rhythmic verse with poetic form and descriptive language. The deliberate use of prose and verse creates a stark contrast between the characters, allowing the reader to understand the social status and characteristics portrayed.

“Time travels at different speeds for different people. I can tell you who time strolls for, who it trots for, who it gallops for, and who it stops cold for.” William Shakespeare , As You Like It

H.G. Wells is often called the “father of science fiction” due to his immense success as an author. His works span various genres, but he is best known for his speculative novels with compelling narrative and vivid characters. 

In War of the World, Wells employs meticulously detailed prose to show the terrifying invasion by Martians. The captivating story is shown through descriptive prose that blends fiction and reality into one mesmerizing tale. To learn more, check out our guide on stream of consciousness poetry!

“Few people realize the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.” H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

Understanding Prose in Literature: A Comprehensive Guide

Defining prose, types of prose, prose vs. verse, prose styles, narrative style, descriptive style, expository style, argumentative style, literary devices in prose, foreshadowing, analyzing prose, close reading, theme and message, notable authors and their prose, jane austen, ernest hemingway, toni morrison, prose in different cultures, greek prose, indian prose, japanese prose.

Prose in literature is a fascinating topic that has captured the attention of readers and writers for centuries. In this comprehensive guide, we will explore the different aspects of prose and how it shapes the world of literature. By understanding prose, you will be able to appreciate the beauty of written language and enhance your own writing skills. So, let's dive into the captivating world of prose in literature!

Prose is a form of written language that follows a natural, everyday speech pattern. It is the way we communicate in writing without adhering to the strict rules of poetry or verse. In literature, prose encompasses a wide range of written works, from novels and short stories to essays and articles. To better understand prose in literature, let's look at the different types of prose and how it compares to verse.

There are several types of prose in literature, each serving a unique purpose and offering a different reading experience:

• Fiction: Imaginative works, such as novels and short stories, that tell a story.
• Non-fiction: Informative works, such as essays, articles, and biographies, that present facts and real-life experiences.
• Drama: Plays and scripts written in prose form, often featuring dialogue and stage directions.
• Prose poetry: A hybrid form that combines elements of prose and poetry, creating a more fluid and expressive style.

By exploring these types of prose, you can better appreciate the versatility and depth of prose in literature.

Prose and verse are two distinct forms of written language, each with its own characteristics and purposes. Here's a quick comparison:

• Prose: Written in a natural, conversational style, prose uses sentences and paragraphs to convey meaning. It is the most common form of writing and can be found in novels, essays, articles, and other forms of literature.
• Verse: Written in a structured, rhythmic pattern, verse often uses stanzas, rhyme, and meter to create a more musical quality. It is most commonly found in poetry and song lyrics.

Understanding the differences between prose and verse can help you appreciate the unique qualities of each form and how they contribute to the richness of literature.

Just as there are different types of prose, there are also various prose styles that authors use to convey their ideas and stories. These styles can be categorized into four main groups:

The narrative style tells a story by presenting events in a sequence, typically involving characters and a plot. This style is commonly used in novels, short stories, and biographies. Some key features of the narrative style include:

• Chronological or non-chronological structure
• Use of dialogue and description
• Focus on characters, their actions, and motivations
• Development of a plot, consisting of a beginning, middle, and end

By using the narrative style, authors can create engaging stories that draw readers in and make them feel a part of the experience.

The descriptive style focuses on painting a vivid picture of a person, place, or thing. This style is used to provide detailed information and create a strong sensory experience for the reader. Some key features of the descriptive style include:

• Use of sensory language, such as sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch
• Adjectives and adverbs to enhance descriptions
• Figurative language, such as similes and metaphors, to create vivid imagery
• Attention to detail and setting

By mastering the descriptive style, authors can transport readers to new worlds and enrich their understanding of the subject matter.

The expository style is used to explain, inform, or describe a topic. This style is commonly found in textbooks, essays, and articles. Some key features of the expository style include:

• Clear, concise language
• Logical organization of information
• Use of examples, facts, and statistics to support the main idea
• An objective, unbiased tone

By employing the expository style, authors can effectively convey information and help readers gain a deeper understanding of a subject.

The argumentative style is used to persuade or convince the reader of a certain viewpoint. This style is often found in opinion pieces, essays, and debates. Some key features of the argumentative style include:

• A clear, well-defined thesis statement
• Logical organization of arguments and evidence
• Use of facts, statistics, and examples to support the thesis
• Addressing and refuting opposing viewpoints
• A persuasive, confident tone

By mastering the argumentative style, authors can effectively present their opinions and persuade readers to consider their perspective.

Understanding these different prose styles can help you appreciate the diverse ways authors use language to convey their ideas and enhance your own writing abilities.

Authors use various literary devices to enrich their prose and make it more engaging for the reader. These devices help create an emotional connection, build suspense, or bring out deeper meanings in the text. Let's explore some of the most commonly used literary devices in prose:

Imagery is the use of vivid and descriptive language to create a picture in the reader's mind. This technique appeals to the five senses and can make a piece of writing more immersive and memorable. Some examples of imagery include:

• Visual imagery: describing the appearance of a character or setting
• Auditory imagery: describing sounds, such as the rustling of leaves or the roar of a crowd
• Olfactory imagery: describing smells, such as the scent of fresh-baked cookies or the aroma of a garden
• Gustatory imagery: describing tastes, such as the sweetness of a ripe fruit or the bitterness of a cup of coffee
• Tactile imagery: describing textures and physical sensations, such as the softness of a blanket or the warmth of the sun

By using imagery, authors can create a richer, more engaging experience for the reader.

Foreshadowing is a technique used to hint at events that will occur later in the story. This can create suspense, build anticipation, and keep the reader engaged. Foreshadowing can be subtle or more direct and can take various forms, such as:

• Character dialogue or thoughts
• Symbolism or motifs
• Setting or atmosphere
• Actions or events that mirror or prefigure future events

By incorporating foreshadowing, authors can create a sense of mystery and intrigue that keeps readers turning the pages.

Allusion is a reference to a well-known person, event, or work of art, literature, or music. This technique allows authors to make connections and add depth to their writing without explicitly stating the reference. Allusions can serve various purposes, such as:

• Creating a shared understanding between the author and the reader
• Establishing a cultural, historical, or literary context
• Adding layers of meaning or symbolism
• Providing a subtle commentary or critique

By using allusion, authors can enhance their prose and engage readers with shared knowledge and cultural references.

These are just a few examples of the many literary devices that authors use to enrich their prose in literature. By understanding and recognizing these techniques, you can deepen your appreciation of the written word and perhaps even add some of these tools to your own writing repertoire.

Analyzing prose in literature involves closely examining the text to gain a deeper understanding of the author's intentions, themes, and techniques. This process can help you appreciate the nuances of the writing and uncover new insights. Let's explore some approaches to analyzing prose:

Close reading is a method of carefully examining the text to identify its structure, themes, and literary devices. This approach involves paying attention to details such as:

• Word choice and diction
• Sentence structure and syntax
• Imagery and figurative language
• Characterization and dialogue
• Setting and atmosphere

By closely examining these elements, you can gain a deeper understanding of the author's intentions and the text's overall meaning.

Identifying the theme or central message of a piece of prose is another important aspect of analysis. A theme is a recurring idea, topic, or subject that runs through the text. Some common themes in literature include:

• Love and relationships
• Identity and self-discovery
• Power and authority
• Conflict and resolution
• Nature and the environment

To identify the theme of a piece of prose, consider the overall message or lesson that the author is trying to convey. Look for patterns, motifs, and symbols that support this message. Understanding the theme can help you better appreciate the author's intentions and the text's significance.

By employing these approaches to analyzing prose in literature, you can deepen your understanding of the text and enhance your appreciation of the author's craft. Whether you're studying a classic novel or a contemporary short story, these skills will help you unlock the richness and complexity of the written word.

Throughout history, numerous authors have made significant contributions to the world of prose in literature. Their unique writing styles and innovative approaches to storytelling have left an indelible mark on the literary landscape. Let's take a closer look at some notable authors and their distinctive prose:

Jane Austen, an English author from the early 19th century, is well-known for her witty and satirical prose. Her novels often center on themes of love, marriage, and social class in the Georgian era. Examples of her work include Pride and Prejudice , Sense and Sensibility , and Emma . Austen's prose is characterized by:

• Sharp wit and humor
• Observant descriptions of characters and their social interactions
• Realistic dialogue that reveals the personalities and motivations of her characters
• Insightful commentary on societal norms and expectations of her time

Ernest Hemingway, an American author from the 20th century, is celebrated for his distinctive writing style that has had a lasting impact on prose in literature. His works often explore themes of war, love, and the human condition, such as in A Farewell to Arms , The Old Man and the Sea , and For Whom the Bell Tolls . Hemingway's prose is characterized by:

• Simple, direct language and short sentences
• An emphasis on action and external events
• Understated emotions and a focus on the physical world
• A "less is more" approach that leaves room for reader interpretation

Toni Morrison, an American author and Nobel laureate, is renowned for her powerful, evocative prose that delves into the complexities of human relationships and the African American experience. Notable works include Beloved , Song of Solomon , and The Bluest Eye . Morrison's prose is characterized by:

• Rich, lyrical language and vivid imagery
• Complex characters and multi-layered narratives
• Explorations of race, gender, and identity
• A strong sense of voice and emotional intensity

These authors, among many others, have each left their unique imprint on the realm of prose in literature. By studying their works and understanding their techniques, we can better appreciate the diverse ways in which writers can use prose to convey their stories and ideas.

Prose in literature is a global phenomenon, with each culture bringing its own distinctive style, themes, and literary traditions to the table. Let's explore how prose has developed and evolved in some cultures around the world:

Ancient Greek prose has had a profound influence on Western literature. Spanning various genres such as philosophy, history, and drama, Greek prose is known for its intellectual depth and stylistic sophistication. Key features of Greek prose include:

• Rhetorical devices like repetition, parallelism, and antithesis
• Emphasis on logic, reason, and argumentation
• Rich vocabulary and complex sentence structures
• Notable authors like Plato, Aristotle, and Herodotus

Indian prose in literature spans thousands of years and numerous languages, with each region and time period contributing its own flavor to the mix. Indian prose is often characterized by:

• Epic tales and religious texts, such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana
• Folk tales, fables, and parables that convey moral lessons
• Ornate and poetic language, with a focus on imagery and symbolism
• Notable authors like Rabindranath Tagore, R. K. Narayan, and Arundhati Roy

Japanese prose in literature is known for its elegance, subtlety, and attention to detail. Spanning various genres such as poetry, drama, and fiction, Japanese prose often explores themes of nature, human emotion, and the passage of time. Key features of Japanese prose include:

• Haiku and other poetic forms that emphasize simplicity and precision
• Descriptions of the natural world and the changing seasons
• Understated emotions and a focus on the inner lives of characters
• Notable authors like Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, and Haruki Murakami

By examining the diverse range of prose in literature from various cultures, we can gain a deeper appreciation for the many ways in which authors use language to tell stories, express ideas, and convey the human experience.

If you found this blog post intriguing and want to delve deeper into writing from your memories, be sure to check out Charlie Brogan's workshop, ' Writing From Memory - Part 1 .' This workshop will guide you through the process of tapping into your memories and transforming them into captivating stories. Don't miss this opportunity to enhance your writing skills and unleash your creativity!

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• Literary Terms
• Definition & Examples
• When & How to Write a Prose

I. What is a Prose?

Prose is just non-verse writing. Pretty much anything other than poetry counts as prose: this article, that textbook in your backpack, the U.S. Constitution, Harry Potter – it’s all prose. The basic defining feature of prose is its lack of line breaks:

In verse, the line ends

when the writer wants it to, but in prose

you just write until you run out of room and then start a new line.

Unlike most other literary devices , prose has a negative definition : in other words, it’s defined by what it isn’t rather than by what it is . (It isn’t verse.) As a result, we have to look pretty closely at verse in order to understand what prose is.

II. Types of Prose

Prose usually appears in one of these three forms.

You’re probably familiar with essays . An essay makes some kind of argument about a specific question or topic. Essays are written in prose because it’s what modern readers are accustomed to.

b. Novels/short stories

When you set out to tell a story in prose, it’s called a novel or short story (depending on length). Stories can also be told through verse, but it’s less common nowadays. Books like Harry Potter and the Fault in Our Stars are written in prose.

c. Nonfiction books

If it’s true, it’s nonfiction. Essays are a kind of nonfiction, but not the only kind. Sometimes, a nonfiction book is just written for entertainment (e.g. David Sedaris’s nonfiction comedy books), or to inform (e.g. a textbook), but not to argue. Again, there’s plenty of nonfiction verse, too, but most nonfiction is written in prose.

III. Examples of Prose

The Bible is usually printed in prose form, unlike the Islamic Qur’an, which is printed in verse. This difference suggests one of the differences between the two ancient cultures that produced these texts: the classical Arabs who first wrote down the Qur’an were a community of poets, and their literature was much more focused on verse than on stories. The ancient Hebrews, by contrast, were more a community of storytellers than poets, so their holy book was written in a more narrative prose form.

Although poetry is almost always written in verse, there is such a thing as “prose poetry.” Prose poetry lacks line breaks, but still has the rhythms of verse poetry and focuses on the sound of the words as well as their meaning. It’s the same as other kinds of poetry except for its lack of line breaks.

IV. The Importance of Prose

Prose is ever-present in our lives, and we pretty much always take it for granted. It seems like the most obvious, natural way to write. But if you stop and think, it’s not totally obvious. After all, people often speak in short phrases with pauses in between – more like lines of poetry than the long, unbroken lines of prose. It’s also easier to read verse, since it’s easier for the eye to follow a short line than a long, unbroken one.

For all of these reasons, it might seem like verse is actually a more natural way of writing! And indeed, we know from archaeological digs that early cultures usually wrote in verse rather than prose. The dominance of prose is a relatively modern trend.

So why do we moderns prefer prose? The answer is probably just that it’s more efficient! Without line breaks, you can fill the entire page with words, meaning it takes less paper to write the same number of words. Before the industrial revolution, paper was very expensive, and early writers may have given up on poetry because it was cheaper to write prose.

V. Examples of Prose in Literature

Although Shakespeare was a poet, his plays are primarily written in prose. He loved to play around with the difference between prose and verse, and if you look closely you can see the purpose behind it: the “regular people” in his plays usually speak in prose – their words are “prosaic” and therefore don’t need to be elevated. Heroic and noble characters , by contrast, speak in verse to highlight the beauty and importance of what they have to say.

Flip open Moby-Dick to a random page, and you’ll probably find a lot of prose. But there are a few exceptions: short sections written in verse. There are many theories as to why Herman Melville chose to write his book this way, but it probably was due in large part to Shakespeare. Melville was very interested in Shakespeare and other classic authors who used verse more extensively, and he may have decided to imitate them by including a few verse sections in his prose novel.

VI. Examples of Prose in Pop Culture

Philosophy has been written in prose since the time of Plato and Aristotle. If you look at a standard philosophy book, you’ll find that it has a regular paragraph structure, but no creative line breaks like you’d see in poetry. No one is exactly sure why this should be true – after all, couldn’t you write a philosophical argument with line breaks in it? Some philosophers, like Nietzsche, have actually experimented with this. But it hasn’t really caught on, and the vast majority of philosophy is still written in prose form.

In the Internet age, we’re very familiar with prose – nearly all blogs and emails are written in prose form. In fact, it would look pretty strange if this were not the case!

Imagine if you had a professor

who wrote class emails

in verse form, with odd

            line breaks in the middle

of the email.

VII. Related Terms

Verse is the opposite of prose: it’s the style of writing

that has line breaks.

Most commonly used in poetry, it tends to have rhythm and rhyme but doesn’t necessarily have these features. Anything with artistic line breaks counts as verse.

18 th -century authors saw poetry as a more elevated form of writing – it was a way of reaching for the mysterious and the heavenly. In contrast, prose was for writing about ordinary, everyday topics. As a result, the adjective “prosaic” (meaning prose-like) came to mean “ordinary, unremarkable.”

Prosody is the pleasing sound of words when they come together. Verse and prose can both benefit from having better prosody, since this makes the writing more enjoyable to a reader.

List of Terms

• Alliteration
• Amplification
• Anachronism
• Anthropomorphism
• Antonomasia
• APA Citation
• Aposiopesis
• Autobiography
• Bildungsroman
• Characterization
• Circumlocution
• Cliffhanger
• Comic Relief
• Connotation
• Deus ex machina
• Deuteragonist
• Doppelganger
• Double Entendre
• Dramatic irony
• Equivocation
• Extended Metaphor
• Figures of Speech
• Flash-forward
• Foreshadowing
• Intertextuality
• Juxtaposition
• Literary Device
• Malapropism
• Onomatopoeia
• Parallelism
• Pathetic Fallacy
• Personification
• Point of View
• Polysyndeton
• Protagonist
• Red Herring
• Rhetorical Device
• Rhetorical Question
• Science Fiction
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
• Synesthesia
• Turning Point
• Understatement
• Urban Legend
• Verisimilitude
• Essay Guide
• Cite This Website

English Studies

This website is dedicated to English Literature, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, English Language and its teaching and learning.

Prose: A Literary Genre

As a literary genre, prose refers to the use of ordinary language and sentence structure in written or spoken form without metrical patterns.

Etymology of Prose

Table of Contents

The word “prose” derives from the Latin term “prosa oratio,” which means “straightforward speech” or “direct discourse.”

It originated in the late Middle English period around the 14th century. It was intended to describe things or places in written or spoken language, lacking the metrical and rhythmic structure found in poetry. Characterized by its natural flow and organization, it becomes suitable for narrative, essays, and everyday communication.

Meanings of Prose

• Definition: It is a form of written or spoken language not structured into regular meter or rhyme.
• Natural Flow: It has a natural flow of language, lacking the formal structure found in poetry.
• Everyday Speech: It relies on the use of everyday speech and conversational tone.
• Literary Genres: It includes a wide range of literary genres, including novels, short stories, essays, and journalism.
• Versatility: It is the most common form of written language and is used in various contexts, including fiction, nonfiction, and academic writing.
• Contrast with Poetry: Contrasted with poetry, it lacks the use of meter, rhyme, and formal elements.
• Emphasis: While poetry often emphasizes sound and rhythm, prose prioritizes meaning and clarity.

Prose in Grammar

Grammatically, “prose” is a singular noun, and it takes a singular verb. However, when referring to multiple pieces, the plural form is not commonly used. Instead, the plural is indicated by using a plural verb, as in “The essays are written in prose.”

Definition of Prose

As a literary genre , it refers to the use of ordinary language and sentence structure in written or spoken form, without the incorporation of metrical or rhythmic patterns typically found in poetry. It serves as a means to convey information, ideas, and stories in a straightforward and clear way, emphasizing clarity and natural expression.

Types of Prose

Here are some common types as follows.

Literary Examples of Prose

However, it must be kept in mind that the literary type of prose is different. It is mostly in narrative or descriptive shape, emphasizing the type of writing it is used in. Here are some examples of narrative form.

In each of these examples, the prose style of the author is an essential part of the literary experience. The language used by the author serves to convey the themes and ideas of the work in a way that is both evocative and engaging for the reader.

Suggested Readings

• Strunk, William, and E.B. White. The Elements of Style. Fourth Edition, Longman, 1999.
• Zinsser, William. On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction. HarperCollins, 2006.
• Tufte, Virginia A. Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. Graphics Press, 2006.
• Williams, Joseph M. Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace. Twelfth Edition, Pearson, 2017.
• Pinker, Steven. The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. Viking, 2014.
• King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Pocket Books, 2000.
• Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers . Vintage, 1991.
• Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. Understanding Fiction. Third Edition, Prentice Hall, 1959.
• Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life . Anchor Books, 1995.

Related posts:

• Onomatopoeia: A Literary Device

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Literary Devices

Literary devices, terms, and elements, definition of prose, common examples of prose, significance of prose in literature, examples of prose in literature.

I shall never be fool enough to turn knight-errant. For I see quite well that it’s not the fashion now to do as they did in the olden days when they say those famous knights roamed the world.

( Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes)

The ledge, where I placed my candle, had a few mildewed books piled up in one corner; and it was covered with writing scratched on the paint. This writing, however, was nothing but a name repeated in all kinds of characters, large and small—Catherine Earnshaw, here and there varied to Catherine Heathcliff, and then again to Catherine Linton. In vapid listlessness I leant my head against the window, and continued spelling over Catherine Earnshaw—Heathcliff—Linton, till my eyes closed; but they had not rested five minutes when a glare of white letters started from the dark, as vivid as spectres—the air swarmed with Catherines; and rousing myself to dispel the obtrusive name, I discovered my candle wick reclining on one of the antique volumes, and perfuming the place with an odour of roasted calf-skin.

( Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë)

“I never know you was so brave, Jim,” she went on comfortingly. “You is just like big mans; you wait for him lift his head and then you go for him. Ain’t you feel scared a bit? Now we take that snake home and show everybody. Nobody ain’t seen in this kawn-tree so big snake like you kill.”

Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton.

( The Sun also Rises by Ernest Hemingway)

Ernest Hemingway wrote his prose in a very direct and straightforward manner. This excerpt from  The Sun Also Rises demonstrates the directness in which he wrote–there is no subtlety to the narrator’s remark “Do not think I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title.”

The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye, that opened suddenly, and softly in the evening. Now— James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-washed rocks; the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with black and white; he could see windows in it; he could even see washing spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”

Test Your Knowledge of Prose

1. Choose the best prose definition from the following statements: A. A form of communicating that uses ordinary grammar and flow. B. A piece of literature with a rhythmic structure. C. A synonym for verse. [spoiler title=”Answer to Question #1″] Answer: A is the correct answer.[/spoiler]

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove

A. It has a rhythmic structure. B. It contains rhymes. C. It does not use ordinary grammar. D. All of the above. [spoiler title=”Answer to Question #2″] Answer: D is the correct answer.[/spoiler]

You’re sad because you’re sad. It’s psychic. It’s the age. It’s chemical. Go see a shrink or take a pill, or hug your sadness like an eyeless doll you need to sleep.

“A Sad Child” B. 

I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.

The Handmaid’s Tale C. 

No, they whisper. You own nothing. You were a visitor, time after time climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming. We never belonged to you. You never found us. It was always the other way round.

“The Moment” [spoiler title=”Answer to Question #3″] Answer: B is the correct answer.[/spoiler]

Prose Fiction: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Narrative

(6 reviews)

Ignasi Ribó

Copyright Year: 2020

Publisher: Open Book Publishers

Language: English

Formats Available

Conditions of use.

Learn more about reviews.

Reviewed by William Pendergast, Adjunct Professor/Coordinator, Bunker Hill Community College on 1/31/21

The book is a through account of the structure of narrative stories. It outlines all the elements that make a narrative successful in a critical writing sense. It defines the subject and breaks down the classic sense of drama throughout the ages... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

The book is a through account of the structure of narrative stories. It outlines all the elements that make a narrative successful in a critical writing sense. It defines the subject and breaks down the classic sense of drama throughout the ages of writing. It shows the narrative in a historical context and outlines the techincal construction process. It does an excellent job looking at the science of the writing process as it pertains to the narrative. It looks at beginnings, endings, genre's, literary devices and dialogue just to name a few. The difference between Prose vs. verse, Narrative vs. drama ;Novel, novella, or short story ;Adventure, fantasy, romance, humor, science-fiction, crime, etc.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

I found the books principles to be quite sound and presented in a very palatable manner. It starts with a useful definition of terms then goes into great depths to explain them. "For the purpose of this book, we will define narrative as the semiotic representation of a sequence of events, meaningfully connected by time and cause." This type of definition is a very dry and advanced level of learning as is much of the text.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 3

This text would be ideal for MFA creative writing program. Its explanation of the narrative is done in a way that would be more helpful to students who are becoming writers as opposed to readers. It is somewhat pedantic and really designed for an advanced student with excellent critical thinking skills. This text is not for a community college level student or even to be used with a college writing course in a typical university. This is a much more advanced text looking at the mechanics of the narrative as opposed to being a collection of stories.

Clarity rating: 4

I found the text to be very clear about the manner in which it presents its material. I feel that some students would have a difficult time with some of the concepts because they would be so unfamiliar with many of the terms used. I enjoyed all the graphs and flow charts showing dramatic arcs and structure. I also enjoyed the pictures that illustrations at marked the different moments in the history of the narrative.

Consistency rating: 5

The text is absolutely consistent in the manner in which it builds the formulation of the narrative. It starts defining it, then explaining the structure, and giving different examples of narratives in various genres. Then looking at significant works throughout history then looking at all the other literary devices that make a great piece of writing to a particular genre.

Modularity rating: 3

The text works in a commutative way. You could break up some of the later chapters if you were doing a workshop on things like dialogue, symbolism, foreshadowing and building characters.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

As a text for a student studying creative writing this is organized in a wonderful manner. It builds from a technical foundation about structure and drama then looks at more of the difference between the craft of writing and the art of it. It starts with Intro which is the definition and explanation of the narrative then plot, setting, characterization, and Language, et.

Interface rating: 5

I didn't find any interface issues. I thought the text reads nicely with the right amount of graphs and charts and pictures, that I thought enhanced the lessons in the text. Many of them were graphs I will use in class today to help students understand the dramatic arc in stories. The pictures showing historical moments help give context and break up the text from reading very dry.

Grammatical Errors rating: 4

I didn't notice very many errors. Some American students might be put off by the use of British English in a lot of the spelling in the text.

Cultural Relevance rating: 3

The text has reference to many of the classics that will be unfamiliar to community college students and no current references really. Students who have studied writing will be familiar with the greek tragedies to the more "modern" classic examples in the text.

This is a fantastic text for a Creative Writing Student or an advanced student that is interested in becoming a writer. For the community college level student or comp student only certain chapters would be helpful to students. This is a text that an instructor could purchase and reframe the material and present to a class that isn't as advanced. I would absolutely buy this text and incorporate it into various levels of my instruction. I would take lessons and repurpose them for my developmental class and present the material as is for my creative writing students.

Reviewed by Luke Brown, Lecturer, Howard University on 1/21/21

The text approaches the question and possibilities of narrative from seven entry points (e.g., setting, language), including a general overview of major threshold concepts, terms, and approaches to narrative in the first chapter. read more

The text approaches the question and possibilities of narrative from seven entry points (e.g., setting, language), including a general overview of major threshold concepts, terms, and approaches to narrative in the first chapter.

I noticed no major issues with the quality of analysis.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 4

The insights of the text will likely remain viable as long as we continue to have narratives; however, it does tend towards older, Euro-centric examples (e.g., Decameron, Oedipus Rex) and would benefit from more contemporary, multicultural exemplars.

Clarity rating: 3

The text does tend towards theoretical argot in its elaborations of core ideas (e.g., real vs. implied vs. ideal reader). While still legible, students may have difficulty following the nuances of the argument without corresponding classroom discussions of the material.

Consistency rating: 4

The text offers a wide range of possible theoretical entry points and frameworks. While none are mutually exclusive, there are more than a single course could likely apply.

Modularity rating: 5

The text approaches the question and possibilities of narrative from seven entry points (e.g., setting, language), including a general overview of major threshold concepts, terms, and approaches to narrative in the first chapter. The thoughtful arrangement of the chapters and subchapters allow instructors to select small excerpts for class instruction which can be taken out of context without an overall loss in meaning.

The overall organization of the text is a clear strength. It both builds on itself over the course of its seven major divisions and each of these divisions could be engaged with independently of the others.

I had no interface issues with this text.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

I noticed no major grammatical oversights.

This text could be improved by moving away from centuries-old, Eurocentric examples and incorporating a wider range of classical and contemporary texts by writers of color and other marginalized groups.

I would recommend this book as a useful supplement to introductory courses focused on creative writing or literary analysis.

Reviewed by Kathryn Evans, Professor, Bridgewater State University on 6/30/20

The book is comprehensive in that it is broad, covering the bases of narrative; however, chapters tend to be brief (students will likely appreciate this, although we might wish for more examples in the form of actual quotations). The glossary... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 4 see less

The book is comprehensive in that it is broad, covering the bases of narrative; however, chapters tend to be brief (students will likely appreciate this, although we might wish for more examples in the form of actual quotations). The glossary definitions are underdeveloped and do not necessarily illuminate the purposes of literary techniques discussed.

Content Accuracy rating: 2

Much of the book is accurate, although there are glaring omissions (e.g., Janet Burroway's co-authors are not listed, nor is the edition of the book noted; direct and indirect characterization are inaccurately described, as mentioned by other reviewers; the concept of genre is oversimplified; and interior monologue is not synonymous with stream of consciousness).

Many students will appreciate the references to Harry Potter throughout (a nice complement to the more historical and canonical works used to illustrate concepts and terms).

I found the book to be clearly written in general; sentences tend to be short, which many students may appreciate.

More examples in the form of quotations are used in later chapters compared to earlier chapters; it would be good to make this consistent throughout.

Most chapters, in my opinion, could be assigned out of sequence.

The book is well organized into chapters and clearly indicated sections.

The interface is impressively smooth; I found it easy to navigate. In addition, the author used a variety of images that were clear and useful (and clearly labelled).

The editing for grammar was excellent.

Cultural Relevance rating: 4

The examples used in the book do not represent a broad diversity of cultures / genders, but the author acknowledges that this lack of representation can be seen as an artifact of historical marginalization.

I would personally consider assigning some chapters; the author has clearly put significant time and thought into developing this book, and it is an impressive accomplishment. (On a more minor note, I would recommend that the author omit the section of the book that quotes Wikipedia, as that source is not generally regarded as being credible.)

Reviewed by Adam Mooney, Associate Lecturer, University of Massachusetts Boston on 6/30/20

The text offers tools for students to read and engage in critical discussion through a comprehensive discussion of narrative theory and narrative elements, including plot, characterization, language, theme, setting, and narration. The introduction... read more

The text offers tools for students to read and engage in critical discussion through a comprehensive discussion of narrative theory and narrative elements, including plot, characterization, language, theme, setting, and narration. The introduction serves as a succinct but expansive introduction to narrative theory, and the text is appropriate in terms of its scope. The text is admirable for its attention to concepts that get overlooked in narrative theory textbooks, including language and theme, and for its accessible and introductory-level approach, which is particularly suitable for early-level college students who may be unfamiliar with rhetorical concepts and terms for literary analysis. The text concludes with a comprehensive and effective glossary that is easy to use. Although the text lacks an index, which could have been helpful, the glossary alone was helpful as a reference tool.

The text relies well on seminal thinkers within narratology and narrative theory, and it provides accurate and objective terms for literary analysis. The text contains no notable errors.

In general, the text is relevant and up-to-date. It makes good use and offers a nice blend of seminal texts in narratology and literary theory (like Barthes and Abbott) and more recent publications on narratology and prose fiction. The text also uses 21st-century references to film and television (like Harry Potter and Game of Thrones), making it relevant and appropriate for young readers but risking potentially quick obsoletion. Indeed, the text relies almost exhaustively on Harry Potter as its "contemporary" example, despite that Harry Potter at this point is no longer relevant for many young students.

Clarity rating: 5

The text has a complex framework but approaches that framework with clarity and accessibility in mind as its primary goals. It explains complicated concepts in a clear and accessible manner. The text is especially successful in its essentialization—without risking the loss of integrity / depth of knowledge—of concepts like semiotic models of narratives. Indeed, one key benefit of the text, as an introduction for early-level college students, is its (self-admitted) avoidance of "overtly technical debates" within literary theory. Instead, the text prefers to streamline different key elements of narratological theory into a clear and simple framework.

The text aims to offer a "bare-bones presentation of narrative theory," and it is consistently successful in its goal to provide an easy-to-follow introduction for students without burdening them with excessive historical or theoretical details.

Modularity rating: 4

The text is designed to supplement a course but not dictate a course. It allows teachers the freedom to choose texts that they feel best reflect each chapter's main topic. Though the lack of examples for direct instruction can be seen as one drawback, the chapters are perfect for breaking into smaller sections in a course. The short length of chapters could also make for productive collaborative reading among students, where groups of students are assigned chapters and co-compose summaries or co-teach lessons based on the chapters.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 4

The text is well-devised in its scope and structure. After a comprehensive introduction, the text moves to think about six different elements of narrative theory: plot, setting, characterization, narration, language, and theme. The first four or five chapters are meant to be the most accessible, and the final two are meant to respond to a gap in textbooks on narrative, which tend not to cover language and theme. Overall, the organization of the text is clear and helpful, and the development of chapters is logical. Within chapters, though, the progression between section--and especially the relationship between sections--is sometimes underexplained. In the introduction, for instance, the sections progress logically from “What Is Narrative?” to “Genres,” but the text fails to explain why the sections progress in this way, leaving the section on “Genres” to be under-contextualized for student readers.

Interface rating: 4

In terms of quality and clarity, the interface of this text is solid. Ribó’s own diagrams and charts are excellent—they are very helpful in explaining intricate and complex concepts, like the semiotic model of narrative. The external images used in the text are clear and attractive on the page, though the use of images and figures is somewhat disconnected from the text itself in that the images only offer superfluous perspectives that go unaddressed and underexplained in the prose. The least effective diagrams are the word clouds that begin each chapter. While these offer a succinct visualization of key terms, it is unclear where the word clouds come from, so words end up being more confusing than helpful, and they tend to capture unnecessary terms. For instance, the word "Fig" (presumably referring to "Figure") appears in the word cloud that accompanies the introduction. Elsewhere, there seems to be a mismatch between the word cloud and the chapter it accompanies. For instance, prior to Chapter 7, on theme, the word “narrative” appears at the center of the word cloud.

There are no glaring grammatical issues in the text. There may be minor grammatical errors, specifically in the use of commas, but my attention to this issue may be highlighted by my closer familiarity with grammar in U.S.-American English.

According to Ribó, this text is designed specifically for Asian students who don't have high familiarity with Western literature and literary theories in their high school education. In this sense, Ribó acknowledges in the preface the book's European focus and influence. He writes, "I have tried my best to expand the cultural range of examples in order to reflect the rich diversity of world literature. However, I am not entirely sure if I have succeeded in this effort, and most likely my explanations and examples are too heavily determined by the European tradition, which is, after all, my own." While this blind spot is acknowledged in the text, it is glaring when the text relies so heavily on a white Western canon, and it verges on cultural insensitivity in its reference to ethnicity as a “theme” in modern narrative, especially when it is only given one or two paragraphs’ worth of attention. Moreover, the text’s only substantial discussion of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity in literary theory is reduced to a few paragraphs at the end of the final chapter. Indeed, the text accounts mostly for a normative perspective; its list of "Examples of Short Stories and Novels" contains almost exclusively works by Western, and usually white, authors. Despite this book's many benefits, its lack of cultural, ethnic, racial, gender, and sexuality diversity is a glaring issue.

The text’s dedication to being a “bare-bones presentation of narrative theory”—that is, to not imposing on instructors’ choice of accompanying texts—at times makes for missed opportunities in terms of giving students accessible examples. For example, in Chapter 2, Ribó describes seven kinds of plots found often in novels and short stories. While Ribó offers specific examples—for instance, Hansel and Gretel as an example of the “overcoming the monster” plot—he misses a good opportunity to offer a modern example of the plot type as well, which would enable students to see narrative plot in older, traditional texts as aligned with plot devices that they may be more interested in or familiar with. Nonetheless, Prose Fiction is noteworthy and successful for its brief, accessible overview of important elements of narrative theory. I can very, very easily imagine this being adapted in literature classrooms smoothly and productively.

Reviewed by Thea Prieto, Adjunct Professor, Portland Community College on 6/24/20

Ribó sets out to create “a conceptual skeleton” of fiction writing, one that allows teachers to decide what readings to use in their classrooms. For a creative writing class, this means the textbook discusses various theories and craft elements of... read more

Ribó sets out to create “a conceptual skeleton” of fiction writing, one that allows teachers to decide what readings to use in their classrooms. For a creative writing class, this means the textbook discusses various theories and craft elements of fiction, as well as provides brief overviews of literary history. The textbook purposefully leaves out specific text samples, while at the same time referencing canonized or mainstream texts, so this textbook would work best as a teaching supplement. I believe introductory students would engage with the chapters regarding plot, setting, and characterization, and intermediate students would engage with the chapters regarding narration, language, and theme, as well as the glossary. Some of the terminology, concepts, and theories may be better discussed in advanced courses.

Content Accuracy rating: 3

The text is informed by an impressive number of craft anthologies and essays, though a majority of the works are by white, male writers (which Ribó acknowledges in the preface). Also, the definitions of story and discourse (Chapter 1), and the definitions of direct and indirect characterization (Chapter 4) differ from my understanding of the craft elements. This may be confusing to students, and students should be made aware of alternate definitions and/or applications.

Ribó references many canonized books, essays, and works of fiction, as well as a number of modern texts. The Harry Potter references will be hard to update, since they permeate the textbook, but the other modern references could be easily swapped out for more timely references, as well as with works by more diverse writers.

Most of the more complex concepts or terms were clearly defined in the text or in the glossary. However, there was some niche language that might ostracize beginning writers.

Consistency rating: 3

Ribó shares in the preface that he purposefully left out specific text samples and readings so the book would be a framework for teachers. The author is consistent in this way, though there are plenty of text references that still contextualize the framework.

Each chapter is broken into sections, and each section is short enough that they can be discussed in class. If the teacher is prepared to contextualize the textbook content, then the sections can be presented out of order.

Each chapter begins with theoretical knowledge, then shifts to practical applications or specific examples or topics, and concludes with a helpful summary and references page.

The eBook version was easy to navigate, and I appreciated the clickable table of contents. I would have liked specific terms to be linked to the glossary entries, and the exampled short stories/novels could be linked to their brief descriptions.

I did not notice any typos or errors.

In the preface, Ribó summarizes the dominance of white, male voices in the Western literary cannon, and he goes more in depth regarding postcolonialism and feminism in Chapter 7, particularly in terms of identity, ideology, morality, and art and politics. Early on he also explains that his examples are heavily determined by the European tradition, but considering the text’s overview of literary history and the importance of perspective in fiction writing, I would have liked to see more writers of color and writers from the LGBTQIA communities represented in the references.

The glossary of terms would be a useful Week 1 resource in my intermediate fiction courses.

Reviewed by Justina Salassi, Coordinator of General and Developmental Education/English Faculty, Central Louisiana Technical Community College on 4/29/20

The text covers its topic very well, giving relevant and easy to understand examples appropriate to second year students. As writing about literature is generally required in literature courses, it would have been helpful to provide some guidance... read more

The text covers its topic very well, giving relevant and easy to understand examples appropriate to second year students. As writing about literature is generally required in literature courses, it would have been helpful to provide some guidance on how students can apply the information provided in the text to writing topics, and how they are to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate literature through these lenses. Additionally, some of the terms and concepts (Classical poet, sign/signifier, etc.) I would not expect second year students to be familiar with were not immediately defined and are not included in the glossary.

Content Accuracy rating: 4

The text is informed by seminal studies in narrative theory and related theories, as shown by the cited works. I found no inconsistencies in theory. However, the text presents direct and indirect characterization in the reverse of what is commonly taught. (In this book, indirect characterization is the explicit attribution of characteristics as told by the narrator and direct characterization is when characteristics are revealed through speech, thoughts, and actions of the character.) If this is a common misconception (of which I am not aware), the author should alert the reader of the misconception to fend off confusion between what is presented and what they might have been taught in the past.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

The text uses both current and seminal sources and relevant, up to date examples.

In terms of clarity, the diction and style is accessible by students and most jargon is defined, with the exception of a few concepts and words that I feel could be more clearly defined in the text, or be included in the glossary (sign, signifier, alterity, etc.).

The framework is the theory of narratology, which is consistent throughout the text.

The text is divided logically into smaller sections, which are easily digestible. However, it would be difficult to present the chapters in a different order to students, as the chapters build on information found in previous chapters.

The organization is logical and presents concepts that build on each other. The end of chapter summaries are very useful. It would have been useful to indicate words that can be found in the glossary, or even provide links between the word and it's entry in the glossary since it is an ebook.

There were no interface issues that I noticed.

I noticed no grammatical issues. The text is very well written.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

The text is very sensitive to cultural difference and is inclusive in its use of examples. The author provides an acknowledgment at the beginning of the predominance of Western Literature and the English language in literary tradition, but attempts to present it in a global context. The text includes the discussion of ideologies, oppression, and themes of identity and alterity.

This book would provide a good foundation for an introduction to fiction course.

Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 4. Characterisation
• 5. Narration
• 6. Language

Ancillary Material

About the book, about the contributors.

Ignasi Ribó (Ph.D. in Modern European Literature and Thought, University of Sussex) is a Catalan writer and scholar. He has been teaching Literary Theory and Semiotics at university level for more than ten years and currently works as a Lecturer in the School of Liberal Arts at Mae Fah Luang University (Chiang Rai, Thailand). Ignasi is the author of several novels, as well as academic essays on literary theory, comparative literature, ecocriticism, biosemiotics, cultural ecology, and environmental philosophy.

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43 of the Most Iconic Short Stories in the English Language

From washington irving to kristen roupenian.

Last year, I put together this list of the most iconic poems in the English language ; it’s high time to do the same for short stories. But before we go any further, you may be asking: What does “iconic” mean in this context? Can a short story really be iconic in the way of a poem, or a painting, or Elvis?

Well, who knows, but for our purposes, “iconic” means that the story has somehow wormed its way into the general cultural consciousness—a list of the best short stories in the English language would look quite different than the one below. (Also NB that in this case we’re necessarily talking about the American cultural consciousness, weird and wiggly as it is.) When something is iconic, it is a highly recognizable cultural artifact that can be used as a shorthand—which often means it has been referenced in other forms of media. You know, just like Elvis. (So for those of you heading to the comments to complain that these stories are “the usual suspects”—well, exactly.) An iconic short story may be frequently anthologized , which usually means frequently read in classrooms, something that can lead to cultural ubiquity—but interestingly, the correlation isn’t perfect. For instance, Joyce’s “Araby” is anthologized more often, but for my money “The Dead” is more iconic . Film adaptations and catchy, reworkable titles help. But in the end, for better or for worse, you know it when you see it. Which means that, like anything else, it all depends on your point of view—icon status is (like most of the ways we evaluate art) highly subjective.

So, having acknowledged that there’s no real way to make this list, but because this is what we’re all here to do, here are some of the most iconic short stories for American readers in the English language—and a few more that deserve to be more iconic than they are.

Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820)

I agonized over whether I should pick “Rip Van Winkle” or “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” from Irving’s oeuvre. Both have many, many adaptations to their name and are so ubiquitous as to have drifted into the folklore realm. The latter certainly has more memorable recent adaptations, but the former  is the only one with a bridge named after it . Ah, screw it, we’ll count them both.

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843)

Poe’s early stream-of-consciousness horror story, unreliable narrator and heart beating under the floorboards and all, is certainly one of the most adapted—and even more often referenced —short stories in popular culture, and which may or may not be the source for all of the hundreds of stories in which a character is tormented by a sound only they can hear. (Still not quite as ubiquitous as Poe himself , though . . .)

Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853)

Once, while I was walking in Brooklyn, carrying my Bartleby tote bag , a woman in an SUV pulled over (on Atlantic Avenue, folks) to excitedly wave at me and yell “Melville! That’s Melville!” Which is all you really need to know about that .

Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890)

I will leave it to Kurt Vonnegut, who famously wrote , “I consider anybody a twerp who hasn’t read the greatest American short story, which is “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” by Ambrose Bierce. It isn’t remotely political. It is a flawless example of American genius, like “Sophisticated Lady” by Duke Ellington or the Franklin stove.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892)

Odds are this was the first overtly Feminist text you ever read, at least if you’re of a certain age; it’s become a stand-in for the idea of women being driven insane by the patriarchy—and being ignored by doctors, who deem them “hysterical.” This is another one with lots of adaptations to its name, including a memorable episode of The Twilight Zone , which concludes: “Next time you’re alone, look quickly at the wallpaper, and the ceiling, and the cracks on the sidewalk. Look for the patterns and lines and faces on the wall. Look, if you can, for Sharon Miles, visible only out of the corner of your eye or… in the Twilight Zone.”

Henry James, “The Turn of the Screw” (1898)

Technically a novella, but discussed enough as a story that I’ll include it here (same goes for a couple of others on this list, including “The Metamorphosis”). It has, as a work of literature, inspired a seemingly endless amount of speculation, criticism, unpacking, and stance-taking. “In comment after comment, article after article, the evidence has been sifted through and judgments delivered,” Brad Leithauser wrote in The New Yorker . Fine, intelligent readers have confirmed the validity of the ghosts (Truman Capote); equally fine and intelligent readers have thunderously established the governess’s madness (Edmund Wilson).” And nothing that inspires so much interpretive interest could escape the many interpretations into other media: films, episodes of television, and much other literature.

Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Toy Dog” (1899)

Widely acknowledged as one of Chekhov’s best stories, if not  the  best, and therefore almost no students get through their years at school without reading it. Has been adapted as a film, a ballet, a play, a musical, and most importantly, a Joyce Carol Oates short story.

W. W. Jacobs, “The Monkey’s Paw” (1902)

So iconic—be careful what you wish for, is the gist—that you probably didn’t even know it started out as a short story. My favorite version is, of course, the Laurie Anderson song .

O. Henry, “The Gift of the Magi” (1905)

According to Wikipedia, there have been 17 different film adaptations of O. Henry’s classic short story about a couple’s thwarted Christmas; the essential format—Della sells her hair to buy Jim a watch chain; Jim sells his watch to buy Della a set of combs—has been referenced and replicated countless times beyond that. I even heard Dax Shepard refer to this story on his podcast the other day, and so I rest my case.

James Joyce, “The Dead” (1914)

The last story in Joyce’s collection  Dubliners and one of the best short stories ever written; just ask anyone who wanted to have read some Joyce but couldn’t crack  Ulysses . (Or anyone who could crack  Ulysses  too.) And let’s not forget the John Huston movie starring Anjelica Huston as Gretta.

Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis” (1915)

Everyone has to read this in school, at some point—which is probably the reason why it’s been parodied, referenced, and adapted many times in just about every format . And why not? What could be more universal than the story of the man who wakes up to find himself transformed into an enormous insect?

Richard Connell, “The Most Dangerous Game” aka “The Hounds of Zaroff” (1924)

“The most popular short story ever written in English” is obviously the one about aristocrats hunting people. Widely adapted , but one of my favorite versions is the episode of Dollhouse in which a Richard Connell (no relation except the obvious) hunts Echo with a bow.

Ernest Hemingway, “The Killers” (1927)

I was tempted to include “Hills Like White Elephants” because of the number of people forced to read it to learn about dialogue (happily, there are other options ), but “The Killers,” while less often anthologized, is more influential overall, and gave us not only two full length film adaptations and a Tarkovsky short but Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain,” which I do think is a very good story to learn from, if not for dialogue, then for story-making.

Zora Neale Hurston, “The Gilded Six-Bits” (1933)

Hurston is most famous for  Their Eyes Were Watching God , but those who know will tell you that this story of love, marriage, betrayal, and love again—which was also made into a 2001 film—is a classic, too.

Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery” (1948)

The short story that launched a thousand letters to  The New Yorker —or if not a thousand , then at least “a torrent . . . the most mail the magazine had ever received in response to a work of fiction.” Still taught widely in schools, and still chilling.

J. D. Salinger, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (1948)

The very first story to destroy many a young mind. In a good way, obviously.

Ray Bradbury, “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950)

Bradbury’s work has thoroughly permeated pop culture; plenty of his stories are widely adapted and referenced, so I could have chosen a few others here (“The Veldt” is my personal favorite). But every year, the image of a smart house going on long after the death of its occupants becomes more chilling and relevant an image; we can’t help but keep going back to it.

Daphne du Maurier, “The Birds” (1952)

I know it’s really the Hitchcock film adaptation that’s iconic, but you wouldn’t have the Hitchcock without the du Maurier.

Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1953)

Another oft-assigned (and oft-argued-over) story, this one with so many title rip-offs .

Elmore Leonard, “Three-Ten to Yuma” (1953)

I know, I know, it’s “Fire in the Hole” that gave us  Justified , and we’re all so very glad. But “Three-Ten to Yuma” has more name recognition—after all, it was adapted into two separate and very good films, the former of which (1957) actually created contemporary slang : in Cuba, Americans are called yumas and the United States is  La Yuma .

Philip K. Dick, “The Minority Report” (1956)

As a whole, Philip K. Dick’s work has had massive influence on literature, film, pop culture, and our cultural attitudes toward technology. Most of his best-known works are novels, but when a short story gets made into a Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise film, you’re basically assuring iconic status right there. (Or at least that’s how it used to work…)

James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues” (1957)

Baldwin’s best known short story pops up in plenty of anthologies, and can be thanked for being the gateway drug for many budding Baldwin acolytes.

Alan Sillitoe, “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” (1959)

Not only is the story itself widely known and read—just ask Rod Blagojevich ( remember him? )—that title has been rewritten and reused thousands of times for varying ends—just ask the reporter who wrote that piece about Blagojevich. Or Adrian Tomine .

John Cheever, “The Swimmer” (1964)

Cheever’s most famous story nails something essential about the mid-century American sensibility, and particularly the mid-century American suburbs, which is probably why everyone knows it (it’s also frequently anthologized). Or maybe it’s more about Burt Lancaster’s little shorts ? Either way.

Joyce Carol Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (1966)

Another frequently anthologized and unwaveringly excellent short story; and look, it’s no one’s fault that Laura Dern turns everything she touches iconic.

Toni Cade Bambara, “The Lesson” (1972)

Yet another story often assigned in schools (the good ones, anyway), which hopefully means one day we’ll wake up and find out that everyone has read it.

Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973)

As others have pointed out before me , Le Guin’s most read and most famous short story is almost always chillingly relevant.

Donald Barthelme, “The School” (1974)

This one might only be iconic for writers, but considering it’s one of the best short stories ever written (according to me), I simply couldn’t exclude it.

Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl” (1978)

Another staple of a writer’s education, and a reader’s; “are you really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?” being a kind of bandied-about shibboleth.

Raymond Carver, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (1981)

I struggled choosing a Carver story for this list—”Cathedral” is more important, and probably more read, but “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” has transcended its own form more completely, at least with its title, which has spawned a host of echoes, including Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running , and Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank , to the point that I think it’s recognizable to just about everyone. A quick Google search will reveal that the framing has been used for almost everything you can think of. There’s—and I kid you not—a What We Talk About When We Talk About Books/War/Sex/God/The Tube/Games/Rape/Money/Creative Writing/Nanoclusters/Hebrew/The Weather/Defunding the Police/Free Speech/Taxes/Holes/Climate/The Moon/Waste/Cancel Culture/Impeachment/Gender/Digital Inclusions/Exacerbations of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease/COVID-19 . You see what I’m getting at here.

Stephen King, “The Body” (1982)

Otherwise known, to the general public, as  Stand By Me .

Amy Hempel, “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” (1983)

Want to feel bad about your writing? This was the first short story Amy Hempel ever wrote.

Lorrie Moore, “How to Be an Other Woman” (1985)

A very very good short story that has given rise to so many bad ones.

Mary Gaitskill, “Secretary” (1988)

Bad Behavior  is iconic as a whole , but probably the story to have most acutely permeated the wider culture is “Secretary,” on account of the film adaptation starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader—despite the fact that it totally butchers the ending.

Amy Tan, “Rules of the Game” (1989)

This story originally appeared in The Joy Luck Club , Tan’s mega-bestseller, so probably almost everyone you know has read it. The film version didn’t hurt either.

Tim O’Brien, “The Things They Carried” (1990)

Why, it’s only the most anthologized short story of the last 30(ish) years. That’s why even the people you know who haven’t picked up a book in their adult lives have read it.

Denis Johnson, “Emergency” (1992)

When I left New York to go get my MFA, a friend gave me a copy of Jesus’ Son with the inscription “Because everyone in your MFA will talk about it and you don’t want to be the girl who hasn’t read it. (It’s also really good).” He was not wrong.

Annie Proulx, “Brokeback Mountain” (1997)

Everybody knows this story—even if they only know it from its (massively successful and influential, not to mention the true Best Picture Winner of 2006) film adaptation—and not for nothing, coming out when it did, it went a long way towards making some Americans more comfortable with homosexuality. Open the floodgates, baby.

Jhumpa Lahiri, “A Temporary Matter” (1998)

The story that made Lahiri a household name.

Ted Chiang, “Story of Your Life” (1998)

Otherwise known as  Arrival . (Also technically a novella.)

Alice Munro, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” (2001)

At this point, almost everyone has read at least some  Alice Munro, right? This story is one of the best from one of the greats, and was also adapted into a fantastic but heartbreaking film,  Away From Her .

Kristen Roupenian, “Cat Person” (2017)

Sure, it’s recent, so it’s not quite as ingrained as some of the others here, but it’s also the story that broke the internet —and quite possibly the only New Yorker  story that thousands of people have ever read.

Finally, as is often the case with lists that summarize the mainstream American literary canon of the last 200 years, it is impossible not to recognize that the list above is much too white and male. So for our future and continuing iconography, your friends at Literary Hub suggest reading the following stories, both new and old:

Eudora Welty, “Why I Live at the P.O.” (1941) Clarice Lispector, “The Imitation of the Rose” (1960) Leslie Marmon Silko, “The Man to Send Rain Clouds” (1969) Ralph Ellison, “Cadillac Flambé” (1973) Octavia Butler, “Bloodchild” (1984) Bharati Mukherjee, “The Management of Grief” (1988) John Edgar Wideman, “Fever” (1990) Sandra Cisneros, “Woman Hollering Creek” (1991) Christine Schutt, “To Have and to Hold” (1996) ZZ Packer, “Brownies” (2003) Edward P. Jones, “Marie” (2004) Karen Russell, “Haunting Olivia” (2005) Kelly Link, “Stone Animals” (2005) Edwidge Danticat, “Ghosts” (2008) Yiyun Li, “A Man Like Him” (2008) Claire Vaye Watkins, “Ghosts, Cowboys” (2009) Ottessa Moshfegh, “Bettering Myself” (2013) Amelia Gray, “House Heart” (2013) Zadie Smith, “Meet the President!” (2013) Carmen Maria Machado, “The Husband Stitch” (2014) Diane Cook, “The Way the End of Days Should Be” (2014) Kirstin Valdez Quade, “Five Wounds” (2015) NoViolet Bulawayo, “Shhhh” (2015) Mariana Enriquez, “Spiderweb” (2016) Ken Liu, “State Change” (2016) Helen Oyeyemi, “Sorry Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea” (2016) Lesley Nneka Arimah, “What Is a Volcano?” (2017) James McBride, “The Christmas Dance” (2017) Viet Thanh Nguyen, “War Years” (2017) Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, “Friday Black” (2018). . .

Honestly, this list could go on forever, but let’s stop and say: more short stories of all kinds in the hands of the general public, please!

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11 Literature (including fiction, drama, poetry, and prose)

• How is literature like life?
• What is literature supposed to do?
• What influences a writer to create?
• How does literature reveal the values of a given culture or time period?
• How does the study of fiction and nonfiction texts help individuals construct their understanding of reality?
• In what ways are all narratives influenced by bias and perspective?
• Where does the meaning of a text reside? Within the text, within the reader, or in the transaction that occurs between them?
• What can a reader know about an author’s intentions based only on a reading of the text?
• What are enduring questions and conflicts that writers (and their cultures) grappled with hundreds of years ago and are still relevant today?
• How do we gauge the optimism or pessimism of a particular time period or particular group of writers?
• Why are there universal themes in literature–that is, themes that are of interest or concern to all cultures and societies?
• What are the characteristics or elements that cause a piece of literature to endure?
• What is the purpose of: science fiction? satire? historical novels, etc.?
• How do novels, short stories, poetry, etc. relate to the larger questions of philosophy and humanity?
• How we can use literature to explain or clarify our own ideas about the world?
• How does what we know about the world shape the stories we tell?
• How do the stories we tell about the world shape the way we view ourselves?
• How do our personal experiences shape our view of others?
• What does it mean to be an insider or an outsider?
• Are there universal themes in literature that are of interest or concern to all cultures and societies?
• What is creativity and what is its importance for the individual / the culture?
• What are the limits, if any, of freedom of speech?

Defining Literature

Literature, in its broadest sense, is any written work. Etymologically, the term derives from Latin  litaritura / litteratura  “writing formed with letters,” although some definitions include spoken or sung texts. More restrictively, it is writing that possesses literary merit. Literature can be classified according to whether it is fiction or non-fiction and whether it is poetry or prose. It can be further distinguished according to major forms such as the novel, short story or drama, and works are often categorized according to historical periods or their adherence to certain aesthetic features or expectations (genre).

Taken to mean only written works, literature was first produced by some of the world’s earliest civilizations—those of Ancient Egypt and Sumeria—as early as the 4th millennium BC; taken to include spoken or sung texts, it originated even earlier, and some of the first written works may have been based on a pre-existing oral tradition. As urban cultures and societies developed, there was a proliferation in the forms of literature. Developments in print technology allowed for literature to be distributed and experienced on an unprecedented scale, which has culminated in the twenty-first century in electronic literature.

Definitions of literature have varied over time.  In Western Europe prior to the eighteenth century, literature as a term indicated all books and writing.  A more restricted sense of the term emerged during the Romantic period, in which it began to demarcate “imaginative” literature.

 Contemporary debates over what constitutes literature can be seen as returning to the older, more inclusive notion of what constitutes literature. Cultural studies, for instance, takes as its subject of analysis both popular and minority genres, in addition to canonical works.

Major Forms

A calligram by Guillaume Apollinaire. These are a type of poem in which the written words are arranged in such a way to produce a visual image.

Poetry is a form of literary art that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, prosaic ostensible meaning (ordinary intended meaning). Poetry has traditionally been distinguished from prose by its being set in verse; prose is cast in sentences, poetry in lines; the syntax of prose is dictated by meaning, whereas that of poetry is held across meter or the visual aspects of the poem.

Prior to the nineteenth century, poetry was commonly understood to be something set in metrical lines; accordingly, in 1658 a definition of poetry is “any kind of subject consisting of Rhythm or Verses”. Possibly as a result of Aristotle’s influence (his  Poetics ), “poetry” before the nineteenth century was usually less a technical designation for verse than a normative category of fictive or rhetorical art. As a form it may pre-date literacy, with the earliest works being composed within and sustained by an oral tradition; hence it constitutes the earliest example of literature.

Prose is a form of language that possesses ordinary syntax and natural speech rather than rhythmic structure; in which regard, along with its measurement in sentences rather than lines, it differs from poetry. On the historical development of prose, Richard Graff notes that ”

Novel : a long fictional prose narrative.

Novella :The novella exists between the novel and short story; the publisher Melville House classifies it as “too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story.”

Short story : a dilemma in defining the “short story” as a literary form is how to, or whether one should, distinguish it from any short narrative. Apart from its distinct size, various theorists have suggested that the short story has a characteristic subject matter or structure; these discussions often position the form in some relation to the novel.

Drama is literature intended for performance.

Listen to this Discussion of the poetry of Harris Khalique . You might want to take a look at the transcript as you listen.

The first half of a 2008 reading featuring four Latino poets, as part of the American Perspectives series at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Listen to poetry reading of Francisco Aragón and Brenda Cárdenas

Listen to this conversation with Allison Hedge Coke, Linda Hogan and Sherwin Bitsui . You might want to look at the transcript as you listen. In this program, we hear a conversation among three Native American poets: Allison Hedge Coke, Linda Hogan and Sherwin Bitsui. Allison Hedge Coke grew up listening to her Father’s traditional stories as she moved from Texas to North Carolina to Canada and the Great Plains. She is the author of several collections of poetry and the memoir, Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer. She has worked as a mentor with Native Americans and at-risk youth, and is currently a Professor of Poetry and Writing at the University of Nebraska, Kearney. Linda Hogan is a prolific poet, novelist and essayist. Her work is imbued with an indigenous sense of history and place, while it explores environmental, feminist and spiritual themes. A former professor at the University of Colorado, she is currently the Chickasaw Nation’s Writer in Residence. She lives in Oklahoma, where she researches and writes about Chickasaw history, mythology and ways of life. Sherwin Bitsui grew up on the Navajo reservation in Arizona. He speaks Dine, the Navajo language and participates in ceremonial activities. His poetry has a sense of the surreal, combining images of the contemporary urban culture, with Native ritual and myth.

Chris Abani : Stories from Africa

In this deeply personal talk, Nigerian writer Chris Abani says that “what we know about how to be who we are” comes from stories. He searches for the heart of Africa through its poems and narrative, including his own.

Listen to Isabel Allende’s Ted Talk

As a novelist and memoirist, Isabel Allende writes of passionate lives, including her own. Born into a Chilean family with political ties, she went into exile in the United States in the 1970s—an event that, she believes, created her as a writer. Her voice blends sweeping narrative with touches of magical realism; her stories are romantic, in the very best sense of the word. Her novels include The House of the Spirits, Eva Luna and The Stories of Eva Luna, and her latest, Maya’s Notebook and Ripper. And don’t forget her adventure trilogy for young readers— City of the Beasts, Kingdom of the Golden Dragon and Forest of the Pygmies.

As a memoirist, she has written about her vision of her lost Chile, in My Invented Country, and movingly tells the story of her life to her own daughter, in Paula. Her book Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses memorably linked two sections of the bookstore that don’t see much crossover: Erotica and Cookbooks. Just as vital is her community work: The Isabel Allende Foundation works with nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area and Chile to empower and protect women and girls—understanding that empowering women is the only true route to social and economic justice.

You can read excerpts of her books online here: https://www.isabelallende.com/en/books

Read her musings. Why does she write? https://www.isabelallende.com/en/musings

You might choose to read one of her novels.

Listen to Novelist Chimamanda Adichie . She speaks about how our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. She tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

One Hundred Years of Solitu de

Gabriel García Márquez’s novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” brought Latin American literature to the forefront of the global imagination and earned García Márquez the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. What makes the novel so remarkable? Francisco Díez-Buzo investigates.

Gabriel García Márquez was a writer and journalist who recorded the haphazard political history of Latin American life through his fiction. He was a part of a literary movement called the  Latin American “boom ,” which included writers like Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa, Argentina’s Julio Cortázar, and Mexico’s Carlos Fuentes. Almost all of these writers  incorporated aspects of magical realism in their work . Later authors, such as Isabel Allende and Salman Rushdie, would carry on and adapt the genre to the cultural and historical experiences of other countries and continents. García Máruqez hadn’t always planned on being a writer, but a pivotal moment in Colombia’s—and Latin America’s—history changed all that. In 1948, when García Márquez was a law student in Bogotá,  Jorge Eliécer Gaítan , a prominent radical populist leader of Colombia’s Liberal Party, was assassinated. This happened while the U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall brought together leaders from across the Americas to create the  Organization of American States  (OAS) and to build a hemisphere-wide effort against communism. In the days after the assassination, massive riots, now called the  bogotazo , occurred. The worst Colombian civil war to date, known as  La Violencia ,  also broke out. Another law student, visiting from Cuba, was deeply affected by Eliécer Gaítan’s death. This student’s name was Fidel Castro. Interestingly, García Márquez and Castro—both socialists—would  become close friends later on in life , despite not meeting during these tumultuous events. One Hundred Years of Solitude ’s success almost didn’t happen, but this  article  from  Vanity Fair  helps explain how a long-simmering idea became an international sensation. When Gabriel García Márquez won the Nobel Prize in 1982, he gave a  lecture  that helped illuminate the plights that many Latin Americans faced on a daily basis. Since then, that lecture has also helped explain the political and social critiques deeply embedded in his novels. It was famous for being an indigenous overview of how political violence became entrenched in Latin America during the Cold War.In an  interview  with the  New Left Review , he discussed a lot of the inspirations for his work, as well as his political beliefs.

Don Quixote

Mounting his skinny steed, Don Quixote charges an army of giants. It is his duty to vanquish these behemoths in the name of his beloved lady, Dulcinea. There’s only one problem: the giants are merely windmills. What is it about this tale of the clumsy yet valiant knight that makes it so beloved? Ilan Stavans investigates.

Interested in exploring the world of  Don Quixote ? Check out  this translation  of the thrill-seeking classic. To learn more about  Don Quixote ’s rich cultural history, click  here . In  this interview , the educator shares his inspiration behind his book  Quixote: The Novel and the World . The travails of  Don Quixote ’s protagonist were heavily shaped by real-world events in 17th-century Spain. This  article  provides detailed research on what, exactly, happened during that time.

Midnight’s Children

It begins with a countdown. A woman goes into labor as the clock ticks towards midnight. Across India, people wait for the declaration of independence after nearly 200 years of British rule. At the stroke of midnight, an infant and two new nations are born in perfect synchronicity. These events form the foundation of “Midnight’s Children.” Iseult Gillespie explores Salman Rushdie’s dazzling novel.

At the stroke of midnight, the first gasp of a newborn syncs with the birth of two new nations. These simultaneous events are at the center of Midnight’s Children, a dazzling novel about the state of modern India by the British-Indian author  Salman Rushdie . You can listen to an interview with Rushdie discussing the novel  here . The chosen baby is Saleem Sinai, who narrates the novel from a pickle factory in 1977. As  this article  argues, much of the beauty of the narrative lies in Rushdie’s ability to weave the personal into the political in surprising ways. Saleem’s narrative leaps back in time, to trace his family history from 1915 on. The family tree is blossoming with bizarre scenes, including clandestine courtships, babies swapped at birth, and cryptic prophecies. However, there’s one trait that can’t be explained by genes alone – Saleem has magic powers, and they’re somehow related to the time of his birth. Saleem recounts a new nation, flourishing and founding after almost a century of British rule. For more information on the dark history of British occupation of India. The vast historical frame is one reason why Midnight’s Children is considered one of the most illuminating works of  postcolonial literature  ever written. This genre typically addresses life in formerly colonized countries, and explores the fallout through themes like revolution, migration, and identity. Postcolonial literature also deals with the search for agency and authenticity in the wake of imposed foreign rule. Midnight’s Children reflects these concerns with its explosive combination of Eastern and Western references. On the one hand, it’s been compared to the sprawling novels of Charles Dickens or George Elliot, which also offer a panoramic vision of society paired with tales of personal development. But Rushdie radically disrupts this formula by adding Indian cultural references, magic and myth. Saleem writes the story by night, and narrates it back to his love interest, Padma. This echoes the frame for  1001 Nights , a collection of Middle Eastern folktales told by Scheherazade every night to her lover – and as Saleem reminds us, 1001 is “the number of night, of magic, of alternative realities.” Saleem spends a lot of the novel attempting to account for the unexpected. But he often gets thoroughly distracted and goes on astonishing tangents, telling dirty jokes or mocking his enemies. With his own powers of telepathy, Saleem forges connections between other children of midnight; including a boy who can step through time and mirrors, and a child who changes their gender when immersed in water. There’s other flashes of magic throughout, from a mother who can see into dreams to witchdoctors, shapeshifters, and many more. Sometimes, all this is like reading a rollercoaster: Saleem sometimes narrates separate events all at once, refers to himself in the first and third person in the space of a single sentence, or uses different names for one person. And Padma is always interrupting, urging him to get to the point or exclaiming at his story’s twists and turns. This mind-bending approach has garnered continuing fascination and praise. Not only did Midnight’s Children win the prestigious Man Booker prize in its year of publication,  but it was named the best of all the winners in 2008 .  All this gives the narrative a breathless quality, and brings to life an entire society surging through political upheaval without losing sight of the marvels of individual lives. But even as he depicts the cosmological consequences of a single life, Rushdie questions the idea that we can ever condense history into a single narrative.

Tom Elemas : The Inspiring Truth in Fiction

What do we lose by choosing non-fiction over fiction? For Tomas Elemans, there’s an important side effect of reading fiction: empathy — a possible antidote to a desensitized world filled with tragic news and headlines.

What is empathy? How does story-telling create empathy? What stories trigger empathy in you? What is narrative immersion? Are we experiencing an age of narcissism? What might be some examples of narcissism? What connection does Tom Elemans make to individualism?

Ann Morgan: My year reading a book from every country in the world

Ann Morgan considered herself well read — until she discovered the “massive blindspot” on her bookshelf. Amid a multitude of English and American authors, there were very few books from beyond the English-speaking world. So she set an ambitious goal: to read one book from every country in the world over the course of a year. Now she’s urging other Anglophiles to read translated works so that publishers will work harder to bring foreign literary gems back to their shores. Explore interactive maps of her reading journey here: go.ted.com/readtheworld

Check out her blog: A year of reading the world   where you can find a complete list of the books I read, and what I learned along the way.

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1 – Introduction

Quick Links

In one form or another, stories are part of everyone’s lives. We constantly tell each other stories, usually about events that happen to us or to people we know. These are typically not invented stories, but they are stories nonetheless. And we would not be able to make sense of our world and our lives without them.

We also enjoy reading, watching, or listening to stories that we know are not true, but whose characters, places, and events spark our imagination and allow us to experience different worlds as if they were our own. These are the kind of stories we call “ fiction. ” Many people like to watch series or soap operas on TV. And even more people like to watch movies, whether in the cinema or streamed to their laptop or smartphone. Video games, comics and manga, songs and musicals, stage plays, and YouTube channels—they all tell stories in their own ways. But if there is one medium that has shown itself particularly well-suited to telling engaging and lasting stories throughout the ages, it is written language . It is fair to say that stories—and most particularly fiction in its various forms and genres—constitute the backbone of literature.

In this chapter, we will introduce some basic ideas about storytelling—in particular the narrative forms of literature and the ways they create meaning. We will also present the main genres  literary narratives have been divided into historically and how these genres have evolved from their origins. We will then try to define and frame the two genres of prose fiction that are most common today: short stories and novels.

Not everyone approaches these genres in the same way. Here, we follow a semiotic model to study and interpret narrative structure and meaning. To understand this model, it is essential to grasp the distinction between story and discourse , which will guide our discussions throughout the book. To conclude this chapter, we will consider how short stories and novels spread beyond the written word and become interconnected with other media in contemporary culture.

1.1 What is Narrative?

Narrative is notoriously difficult to define with precision. But even before we attempt a working definition of the concept, we already know that it refers to storytelling. The term itself comes from the Latin word narro , which means “to tell.” In English, to narrate means to tell a story. According to many anthropologists, this ability is universal amongst human beings. 1 All peoples, everywhere and throughout history, tell each other stories, or, as they are technically called, narratives. As the semiotician and literary critic Roland Barthes once wrote,

The narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances—as though any material were fit to receive man’s stories. Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting, stained-glass windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there has never been a people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their narratives, enjoyment of which is very often shared by men with different, even opposing, cultural backgrounds. Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself. 2

For the purpose of this book, we will define narrative as the semiotic representation of a sequence of events, meaningfully connected by time and cause . 3 This definition highlights certain key elements shared by all forms of narrative:

• Narratives are semiotic representations . That is, they are made of material signs (written or spoken words, moving or still images, etc.) which convey or stand for meanings that need to be decoded or interpreted by the receiver
• Narratives present a sequence of events. That is, they connect at least two events (actions, happenings, incidents, etc.) in a common structure or organized whole.
• Narratives connect events by time and cause , that is, they organize the sequence of events based on their relationship in time (“Hear the sweet cuckoo. Through the big-bamboo thicket, the full moon filters” 4 ), as cause and effect (“Into the old pond, a frog suddenly plunges. The sound of water. 5 ), or, in most narratives, by both temporal and causal relationships, and
• Narratives are meaningful , that is, they have meaning for both senders and receivers, although these meanings do not need to be the same.

As this definition suggests, narrative is the fundamental way in which we humans make sense of our existence. Without effort, we connect everything that happens in our lifeworld ( events ) as a temporal or causal sequence, and most often as both. To understand our lives and the world around us, we need to tell ourselves and each other meaningful stories. Even our perception of things that appear to be static inevitably involves making up stories. 6 Are you able to look at the picture in Figure 1.1 below without seeing a connected sequence of events, a narrative, in it?

Fig. 1.1 Collision of Costa Concordia, cropped (2012). By Roberto Vongher,CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Collision_of_ Costa_Concordia_5_crop.jpg

Genres are conventional groupings of texts (or other semiotic representations) based on certain shared features. These groupings, which have been used since ancient times by writers, readers, and critics, serve a variety of functions:

• Classification: by identifying the features that are worthy of attention, genres help us to place a particular text among similar texts and distinguish it from most other texts
• Prescription: genres institute standards and rules that guide writers in their work. Sometimes these rules are actively enforced ( normative genres ), while at other times they act simply as established customs
• Interpretation: these same standards and rules help readers to interpret texts by providing them with shared conventions and expectations about the different texts they encounter, and
• Evaluation: critics also use these standards and rules when they set about judging the artistic quality of a text by comparing it with other texts in the same genre.

Already in Ancient Greece and Rome, narrative was a major literary genre ( epic ), distinct from poetic song ( lyric ) and stage performance ( drama ). Other generic classifications, particularly those related to the content of the story ( tragedy, comedy, pastoral, satire , etc.), were also commonly used. But the basic classification of poetic forms at the time, established by Plato and Aristotle, was based on whether the poet told the story ( diegesis ) or the story was represented or imitated by actors ( mimesis ). This division still exists today between diegetic (telling) and mimetic (showing) fiction.

While Classical and Neoclassical poetics thought of genres as fixed and preordained forms that poets needed to abide by, modern literary theory, starting with the Romantic period, has come to see genres as dynamic and loosely defined conventions . Genres change and evolve through time. Different cultures define and institute different genres. In fact, modern literature has seen a significant expansion of genres, as a visit to any bookstore or online bookseller will attest (see Fig. 1.2).

Fig. 1.2 El Ateneo Gran Splendid. A theater converted into a bookshop. Buenos Aires, Argentina. Photo by Galio, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:Buenos_Aires_-_Recoleta_-_El_Ateneo_ex_Grand_Splendid_2.JPG

Genres continuously evolve across different dimensions, such as content, style, or form. They are often organized at different levels of subordination, in hierarchies or taxonomies of genres and subgenres. Today, for example, the following generic distinctions are commonly used to classify stories:

• Fiction vs. nonfiction (based on whether the events and the characters of the story are invented or taken from reality)
• Prose vs. verse (based on the literary technique used to tell the story)
• Narrative vs. drama (based on whether the story is told or shown)
• Novel, novella, or short story (based on length)
• Adventure, fantasy, romance, humor, science-fiction, crime, etc. (based on content).

These and many other generic classifications allow us to impose order on the vast number of stories that are published every year. But they are not set in stone and are certainly not eternal. Following the disposition of writers, readers, and critics, new genres appear and disappear, often combining the characteristics of previous texts or developing from the ambiguous boundaries of existing genres , as with the blending of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ into ‘faction’ (or nonfiction novel). 7 There is little doubt that novels and short stories are the most popular narrative fiction genres in contemporary literature. Like all genres, however, they appeared at some point in history and will only last as long as people are interested in writing and reading them.

1.3 Prose Fiction

Prose is text written or spoken with the pattern of ordinary or everyday language, without a metrical structure. Verse , on the other hand, is written or spoken with an arranged metrical rhythm, and often a rhyme. While narrative fiction composed in verse was common in the past, modern writers overwhelmingly tell their stories in prose, to the point that most readers today would be baffled if they encountered fiction written in verse, though it does exist (see Derek Walcott’s Omeros , which is best described as epic poetry). By far, the most popular genres of fiction today are novels and short stories. The distinction between the two is fairly simple: short stories are short. Any other difference that we might find between these two genres of narrative is derived in one way or another from this simple fact.

But before identifying certain key differences, it is important to understand that both short stories and novels are modern narrative genres, which only emerged in their current forms during the European Renaissance. 8 Of course, people had been telling each other fictional stories in other forms since much earlier and in many other places. Perhaps the two forms that had the strongest influence on the emergence of these modern genres of prose fiction were the Classical epic poems , most particularly Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and the Hebrew Bible, which is filled with a wide variety of short stories.

During the European Renaissance, these and other influences stimulated many writers to produce fictional narratives in prose using vernacular languages (instead of Latin), so that they could reach a growing audience of readers. These narratives were not intended to be read aloud, like epic poems or other forms of poetry and drama, but silently, as part of an intimate experience between the reader and the text. 9 Initially, these new narratives, inspired in Middle Eastern and Indian storytelling, tended to be short and were often published as a collection, like Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353, Fig. 1.3). Contemporaries referred to them as novelle (singular, novella ), which means ‘new’ in Italian and is a term still in use today to refer to short novels. From the perspective of Western culture, these early novelle are the first modern forms of prose fiction.

Fig. 1.3: Boccaccio, Decameron : ‘The Story of the Marchioness of Montferrat,’ 15th century. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Public Domain, https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Decameron_BNF_MS_ Italien_63_f_22v.jpeg

A little later in the Renaissance, some authors began to extend these novelle into longer stories that occupied the whole book with the adventures of a single protagonist. In this way, what we now call the novel was born. The first modern novel, according to most, is Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605, Fig. 1.4), the tragicomic story of a deluded country squire who tries to revive the heroic lifestyle depicted in fictional books of chivalry. We should not forget, however, that long narratives, similar in many ways to modern novels, had already been written and read in different cultures throughout history. For example, consider Lucius Apuleius’ The Golden Ass (ca. 170), Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe (2nd century), Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji (1010), Ramon Llull’s Blanquerna (1283), or Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms (ca. 1321), amongst many others.

Fig. 1.4: Title page of the first edition of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605). Biblioteca Digital Hispánica, Public Domain, https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Don_Quixote#/media/File:El_ ingenioso_hidalgo_don_Quijote_de_ la_Mancha.jpg

Due to their difference in length, short stories and novels also tend to differ in certain respects:

• Short stories need to focus on a few characters, a limited number of environments, and just one sequence of events. They cannot afford to digress or add unnecessary complications to the plot. Density, concentration, and precision are essential elements of good short-story writing
• Novels , on the other hand, can explore many different characters, environments, and events. The story can be enriched with subplots and complications that add perspective, dynamism, and interest. Characters have room to evolve, and the author can introduce digressions and commentary without undermining the form. Scope, breadth, and sweep are essential elements of good novel writing.

1.4 Story and Discourse

The systematic study of narratives in order to understand their structure (how they work) and function (what they are for) is called narratology . 10 This field has developed a set of conceptual tools that allow us to discern with more clarity and precision how narratives are meaningful for writers and readers. Narratology is closely linked with semiotics , the study of meaning-making processes , and in particular the use of signs and signifying systems to communicate meaning. In this sense, it is important to realize that narratological models are not so much concerned with explaining individual narratives. Rather they identify the underlying semiotic system that makes narrative production and reception possible. 11

The semiotic or communicative model of narrative that will be developed in this textbook (see Fig. 1.5) distinguishes the real people who participate in the communicative act of writing and reading (the real author and the real reader) from their textual or implied counterparts.

Thus, the “ implied author “ 12 is not the actual individual who writes a book, but a projection of that individual in the book itself . For instance, Ernest Hemingway (Fig. 1.6) was born in 1899, wrote novels like The Old Man and the Sea and short stories like “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” and died in 1961. When we read one of his narratives, we do not listen to him telling us a story (how could we?) but to a virtual persona to whom we attribute a style, attitudes, and values, based on what we find in the text itself.

Similarly, although we are the actual readers, the text does not address us as particular individuals. Otherwise, every book could only have a single intended receiver and the rest of us would be eavesdroppers. But books, unlike letters, are generally addressed to an abstract or generic receiver . We can define the notion of “ implied reader “ 13 as the virtual persona to whom the implied author is addressing the narrative, as can be deduced from the text itself. When any of us, at any time, picks up a Hemingway novel or short story and starts to read, we effectively step into the shoes of its implied reader.

Once we move into the narrative text itself, which already contains an implied author and an implied reader—both only circumstantially related to human beings in the real world—we need to distinguish two different levels of communication: discourse and story . 14

At one level, there is the message that the implied author sends to the implied reader. We will call this message “discourse.” Narrative discourse is the means through which the narrative is communicated by the implied author to the implied reader. It includes elements like:

• Narration (narrator and narratee, point of view, etc.)

The content of narrative discourse is a “ story .” But the story is not told directly by the implied author to the implied reader. It is the narrator (a figure of discourse) who tells the story to a narratee (another figure of discourse). Sometimes, narrators and narratees are also characters in the story, but at other times they are not. Therefore, we cannot say that narrators or narratees are people, nor even characters. Both exist only in narrative discourse. The story, then, is simply what the narrator communicates to the narratee (see Fig. 1.7). It includes elements like:

• Events (plot)
• Environments (setting)
• Characters (characterization)

Fig. 1.7 Semiotic model of narrative shown in speech bubbles. By Ignasi Ribó, CC BY.

In the next chapters, we will examine all these elements in detail. First, we will look at the key elements of story: plot, setting, and characterization . Then, we will examine the key elements of discourse: narration, language, and theme . While reading these chapters, keep in mind the fundamental distinction between story and discourse, without which many aspects of narrative fiction cannot be properly understood.

1.5 Beyond Literature

As we have seen, narratives are not confined to literary works. Certainly, novels and short stories have been the privileged vehicles of storytelling since the European Renaissance until the present day. But the invention of other media, such as cinema, television, or the Internet, has rapidly changed the way people produce and consume narratives.

During the 20th century, cinema developed into an alternative medium to tell the kind of stories that previously were the domain of novels or plays. Like novels, movies are narratives that present a sequence of events connected by time and cause. Unlike novels, however, movies are not meant to be read, but to be watched. In this sense, movies are like theater plays: they show ( mimesis ) a performance of the events, environments, and characters of the story, rather than having a narrator convey those events, environments, and characters through words. Of course, cinema is not completely like drama because the camera, by selecting and framing the events presented in the narrative, acts in some ways like a narrator . In fact, we may well consider cinema a new narrative form, one that draws both from the epic (prose fiction) and dramatic (stage play) genres. 15

The intimate relationship between literary and cinematographic narratives is clearly shown by the fact that many movies have tried to retell the stories found in prose fiction. In general, a narrative based on a story previously presented in a different medium is called an adaptation . In some cases, prose fiction can also be adaptations, for example when it adapts stories from journalistic accounts, history books, or even movies. Much more common, however, is for movies to attempt to bring successful novels and short stories to the screen. For example, J. K. Rowling’s series of novels about the adventures of the young wizard Harry Potter and his friends has been adapted into popular movies by Hollywood (see Fig. 1.8). Television has also drawn fiction from literary sources. One example is the adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s series of medieval fantasy novels A Song of Ice and Fire into a successful television show, Game of Thrones, and its 2022 spinoff, House of the Dragon.

Adaptations are always the subject of passion and controversy. Many attempts to adapt great novels to cinema or television have been negatively received by spectators, who decry the lack of respect for the original story or find the movie less engaging and pleasing than the novel. Less frequently, film adaptations are acclaimed by spectators and critics as superior to the novels or short stories that inspired them.

What most people tend to forget is that adaptations are not translations of the original works. Rather, an adaptation is always an interpretation . In the same way that two readers will never read the same novel—because their interpretation of the events, environments, and characters represented in the story will be different—an adaptation is necessarily a subjective reading of the original text. Moreover, adaptations are creative interpretations because they produce new texts or semiotic representations (cinema, television, comic, videos, etc.) driven by their own artistic motivations and structural constraints.

The fact is that stories cannot be contained in any particular medium or restricted to any predetermined set of rules . Once they have been told, in whatever form or shape, and as long as people pay attention to them, they become part of our cultural makeup. People are free to read them and use them as they like, whether it is for their own private enjoyment or to adapt, transform, and share them with others. These adaptations may try to be as faithful as possible to what the adapter thinks is the original intention of the author or the true meaning of the text. But they can also subvert those meanings through irony , humor , and commentary , like the memes that proliferate in the Internet era.

At the end of the day, stories do not exist to be revered and conserved in a state of purity. They constitute the fundamental means by which we humans give meaning to our world. And as such, they are always open to new interpretations. 16

1.6 Summary

• Narrative is the semiotic representation of a sequence of events, meaningfully connected by time and cause. Literary narratives use written language to represent the connected sequence of events
• There are many ways to classify literary narratives into different genres , according, for example, to the truthfulness of the events (fiction and nonfiction), to the way the story is told (prose and verse), to the length of the story (novel and short story), or to the content of the story (adventure, science-fiction, fantasy, romance, etc.)
• Prose Fiction is narrative written without a metrical pattern that tells an imaginary or invented story. The most common genres of prose fiction in modern literature are novels and short stories. Novels tend to be much longer than short stories
• The semiotic model of narrative , developed in the field of narratology , makes a key distinction between discourse (how the narrative is conveyed from the implied author to the implied reader ) and story (what the narrator tells the narratee ), and
• Prose fiction is part of the manifold narratives that people use to communicate relevant meanings to each other through a wide variety of media, such as film, television, comics, etc.
• See, for example, William Bascom’s “The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives” in The Journal of American Folklore , 78:307 (1965), 3–20.
• See Roland Barthes’ “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” in A Roland Barthes Reader , ed. by Susan Sontag, trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Vintage, 1994), pp. 251–52.
• Based on Narratology: An Introduction , ed. by Susana Onega Jaén and José Angel García Landa (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 3, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315843018
• Haiku by Matsuo Bashō, in Daniel Crump Buchanan’s One Hundred Famous Haiku
• Haiku by Matsuo Bashō, in Buchanan, p. 88.
• H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511816932
• See David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts (New York, NY: Viking, 1993), p. 203.
• For a detailed history, see Paul Cobley’s Narrative (London, UK: Routledge, 2014).
• Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2014).
• See Mieke Bal’s Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017).
• David Herman’s Basic Elements of Narrative (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444305920 ; Jørgen Dines Johansen, Literary Discourse: A Semiotic-Pragmatic Approach to Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442676725
• Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
• Wolfgang Iser’s The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
• See Seymour Benjamin Chatman’s Reading Narrative Fiction (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1993); Seymour Benjamin Chatman’s Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
• See Robert Stam’s Film Theory: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000).
• Umberto Eco’s The Open Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

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Ignasi Ribó, Prose Fiction: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Narrative. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2019.  https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0187

Version History: Created new verso art. Added quick links. Bolded keywords. Made minor phrasing edits for American audiences. Adopted MLA style for punctuation. Changed paragraphing for PressBooks adaptation. Altered art location for pageless scrolling. Moved footnotes to endnotes. Added House of the Dragon reference for currency, October, 2021.

Linked bolded keywords to Glossary and improved Alt-image text for accessibility, July, 2022.

Abbott, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511816932

Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto, CA: University of Toronto Press, 2017).

Barthes, Roland. “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative.” A Roland Barthes Reader , ed. by Susan Sontag, trans. by Stephen Heath (London, UK: Vintage, 1994), pp. 251–95.

Bascom, William. “The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives.” The Journal of American Folklore , 78:307 (1965), 3–20.

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

Buchanan, Daniel Crump. One Hundred Famous Haiku (Tokyo: Japan Publications, 1973).

Burroway, Janet. Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226616728.001.0001

Chatman, Seymour Benjamin. Reading Narrative Fiction (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1993).

Chatman, Seymour Benjamin. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).

Cobley, Paul. Narrative (London, UK: Routledge, 2014).

Eco, Umberto. The Open Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

Herman, David. Basic Elements of Narrative (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444305920

Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

Johansen, Jørgen Dines. Literary Discourse: A Semiotic-Pragmatic Approach to Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), https://doi. org/10.3138/9781442676725

Lodge, David. The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts (New York, NY: Viking, 1993).

Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2014).

Onega Jaén, Susana, and José Angel García Landa, eds. Narratology: An Introduction (London, UK: Routledge, 1996), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315843018

Stam, Robert. Film Theory: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000).

Walcott, Derek. Omeros . (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990). Print.

A narrative that represents imagined (or partially imagined) characters, events, and environments.

Conventional grouping of texts (or other semiotic representations) based on certain shared features.

Study of meaning-making processes, especially the use of signs and signifying systems to communicate meanings.

A complete chronological sequence of interconnected events.

The means through which a narrative is communicated by the implied author to the implied reader.

Semiotic representation of a sequence of events, meaningfully connected by time and cause.

A change of state occurring in the storyworld, including actions undertaken by characters and anything that happens to a character or its environment. Also called a “plot point.”

A category of fiction where a story is recounted through narration. While all stories contain at least implied narrators, diegetic fiction “tells” through a distinct perspective.

A classification for literature that attempts to mimic the real world. Fiction that seeks verisimilitude.

Written or spoken language without metrical structure, typically without rhyme.

A fictional narrative longer than a short story but shorter than a standard novel, written in prose, and generally intended to be read in silence.

A fictional narrative of shorter length than a novel and a novella, written in prose, and generally intended to be read in silence.

A fictional narrative of book length, written in prose, and generally intended to be read in silence.

The systematic study of narratives in order to understand their structure (how they work) and function (what they are for).

The projection of the real author in the text, as can be inferred by the reader from the text itself.

The virtual reader to whom the implied author addresses its narrative, and whose thoughts and attitudes may differ from an actual reader.

The figure of discourse that tells the story to a narratee.

The figure of discourse to whom a story is told by the narrator.

A work based on a story previously told in a different medium.

Use of discourse to state something different from, or even opposite to, what is meant.

Any pronouncement of the narrator that goes beyond a description or account of the existents of the storyworld.

Prose Fiction Copyright © by Miranda Rodak and Ben Storey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Short : an international anthology of five centuries of short-short stories, prose poems, brief essays, and other short prose forms

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Creators/contributors, contents/summary.

• Precursors : sixteenth to eighteenth centuries ; Girolamo Gardano ; Michel de Montaigne ; Baltasar Gracian ; Francois de la Rochefoucauld ; John Aubrey ; Jean de la Bruyere ; Louis-Sébastien Mercier ; Chamfort ; Joseph Joubert ; William Blake ; August Wilhelm Schlegel ; Novalis ; Friedrich Schlegel ; Giacomo Leopardi
• Modern shorts : nineteenth to twenty-first centuries ; Louis "Aloysius" Bertrand ; Edgar Allan Poe ; Charles Baudelaire ; Ambrose Bierce ; Stephane Mallarmé ; Boleslaw Prus ; Kate Chopin ; Robert Louis Stevenson ; Arthur Rimbaud ; Oscar Wilde ; Peter Altenberg ; Félix Fénéon ; Jules Renard ; Ruben Darío ; Marcel Schwob ; Paul Valéry ; Macedonio Fernandez ; Karl Kraus ; Gertrude Stein ; Sherwood Anderson ; Max Jacob ; Filippo Tommaso Marinetti ; Lord Dunsany ; Edward Thomas ; Robert Walser ; Guillaume Apollinaire ; Robert Musil ; Juan Ramón Jiménez ; Virginia Woolf ; Franz Kafka ; Ernst Bloch ; T.S. Eliot ; Fernando Pessoa ; Ramon Gómez de la Serna ; Walter Benjamin ; Joseph Roth ; James Thurber ; Jean Toomer ; Paul Éluard ; Benjamin Péret ; Mikhail Zoshchenko ; Paul Colinet ; Jorge Luis Borges ; Henri Michaux ; Francis Ponge ; Nathalie Sarraute ; Andreas Embirikos ; Laura (Riding) Jackson ; Luis Cernuda ; Malcolm de Chazal ; Raymond Queneau ; Fillia ; Daniil Kharms ; Stanley Kunitz ; Samuel Beckett ; René Char ; Leonardo Sinisgalli ; Enrique Anderson Imbert ; E.M. Cioran ; Max Frisch ; Czeslaw Milosz ; Kenneth Patchen ; John Cage ; Aimé Césaire ; David Ignatow ; Octavio Paz ; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ; Paul Celan ; Clarice Lispector ; Augusto Monterroso ; Giorgio Manganelli ; Italo Calvino ; Zbigniew Herbert ; Bob Kaufman ; Kenneth Koch ; Robert Bly ; Christopher Middleton ; Frank O'Hara ; John Ashbery ; W.S. Merwin ; Charles Tomlinson ; James Wright ; Gael Turnbull ; Fielding Dawson ; Donald Barthelme ; Thomas Bernhard ; Tomas Tranströmer ; Vern Rutsala ; Sonia Sanchez ; Mark Strand ; Jack Anderson ; Michael Benedikt ; Russell Edson ; Helga Novak ; Steven Schrader ; David Young ; Gianni Celati ; Moacyr Scliar ; Charles Simic ; Luisa Valenzuela ; Margaret Atwood ; Seamus Heaney ; Alex Kuo ; Robert Haas ; Lyn Hejinian ; John Edgar Wideman ; Antonio Lobo Antunes ; Ron Padgett ; Rikki Ducornet ; Phillip Lopate ; Stephen Mitchell ; Michael Ondaatje ; James Tate ; Lynne Tillman ; Paul Violi ; Scott Russell Sanders ; Diane Williams ; Rae Armantrout ; Lou Beach ; Lydia Davis ; Yusef Komunyakaa ; Gregory Orr ; David Lehman ; Christine Schutt ; Lynn Emanuel ; Jamaica Kincaid ; Barry Yourgrau ; Anne Carson ; Carolyn Forché ; John Yau ; Meena Alexander ; Bernard Cooper ; Joy Harjo ; Amy Hempel ; Peter Johnson ; Ana Maria Shua ; Maxine Chernoff ; Ray Gonzalez ; Jean-Michel Maulpoix ; Naomi Shihab Nye ; Jayne Anne Phillips ; Peter Wortsman ; Harryette Mullen ; Aleida Rodríguez ; Thylias Moss ; Helen Klein Ross ; Marilyn Chin ; Kimiko Hahn ; Stacey Harwood ; Gary Lutz ; Michael Martone ; Susan Wheeler ; Dionisio D. Martínez ; Amy Newman ; Dawn Raffel ; Sharan Strange ; Denise Duhamel ; Campbell McGrath ; Andrej Blatnik ; Claudia Rankine ; Joe Wenderoth ; Etgar Keret ; Ben Marcus ; Kim White ; Kim Chinquee ; Dawn Lundy Martin ; Deb Olin Unferth ; Aimee Bender ; Dave Eggers ; J. Robert Lennon ; Catherine Wing ; Sonya Chung ; Liliana Blum ; Sarah Manguso ; Gabrielle Calvocoressi ; Ben Lerner ; Craig Morgan Teicher ; Ann Dewitt ; Traci Brimhall ; Amelia Gray.

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11 Literature (including fiction, drama, poetry, and prose)

Essential Questions for Literature

• How is literature like life?
• What is literature supposed to do?
• What influences a writer to create?
• How does literature reveal the values of a given culture or time period?
• How does the study of fiction and nonfiction texts help individuals construct their understanding of reality?
• In what ways are all narratives influenced by bias and perspective?
• Where does the meaning of a text reside? Within the text, within the reader, or in the transaction that occurs between them?
• What can a reader know about an author’s intentions based only on a reading of the text?
• What are enduring questions and conflicts that writers (and their cultures) grappled with hundreds of years ago and are still relevant today?
• How do we gauge the optimism or pessimism of a particular time period or particular group of writers?
• Why are there universal themes in literature–that is, themes that are of interest or concern to all cultures and societies?
• What are the characteristics or elements that cause a piece of literature to endure?
• What is the purpose of: science fiction? satire? historical novels, etc.?
• How do novels, short stories, poetry, etc. relate to the larger questions of philosophy and humanity?
• How we can use literature to explain or clarify our own ideas about the world?
• How does what we know about the world shape the stories we tell?
• How do the stories we tell about the world shape the way we view ourselves?
• How do our personal experiences shape our view of others?
• What does it mean to be an insider or an outsider?
• Are there universal themes in literature that are of interest or concern to all cultures and societies?
• What is creativity and what is its importance for the individual / the culture?
• What are the limits, if any, of freedom of speech?

Defining Literature

Literature, in its broadest sense, is any written work. Etymologically, the term derives from Latin  litaritura / litteratura  “writing formed with letters,” although some definitions include spoken or sung texts. More restrictively, it is writing that possesses literary merit. Literature can be classified according to whether it is fiction or non-fiction and whether it is poetry or prose. It can be further distinguished according to major forms such as the novel, short story or drama, and works are often categorized according to historical periods or their adherence to certain aesthetic features or expectations (genre).

Taken to mean only written works, literature was first produced by some of the world’s earliest civilizations—those of Ancient Egypt and Sumeria—as early as the 4th millennium BC; taken to include spoken or sung texts, it originated even earlier, and some of the first written works may have been based on a pre-existing oral tradition. As urban cultures and societies developed, there was a proliferation in the forms of literature. Developments in print technology allowed for literature to be distributed and experienced on an unprecedented scale, which has culminated in the twenty-first century in electronic literature.

Definitions of literature have varied over time.  In Western Europe prior to the eighteenth century, literature as a term indicated all books and writing. [1]   A more restricted sense of the term emerged during the Romantic period, in which it began to demarcate “imaginative” literature. [2]

 Contemporary debates over what constitutes literature can be seen as returning to the older, more inclusive notion of what constitutes literature. Cultural studies, for instance, takes as its subject of analysis both popular and minority genres, in addition to canonical works. [3]

Major Forms

A calligram by Guillaume Apollinaire. These are a type of poem in which the written words are arranged in such a way to produce a visual image.

Poetry is a form of literary art that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, prosaic ostensible meaning (ordinary intended meaning). Poetry has traditionally been distinguished from prose by its being set in verse; [4]  prose is cast in sentences, poetry in lines; the syntax of prose is dictated by meaning, whereas that of poetry is held across metre or the visual aspects of the poem. [5]

Prior to the nineteenth century, poetry was commonly understood to be something set in metrical lines; accordingly, in 1658 a definition of poetry is “any kind of subject consisting of Rythm or Verses”. [6]  Possibly as a result of Aristotle’s influence (his  Poetics ), “poetry” before the nineteenth century was usually less a technical designation for verse than a normative category of fictive or rhetorical art. [7]  As a form it may pre-date literacy, with the earliest works being composed within and sustained by an oral tradition; [8]  hence it constitutes the earliest example of literature.

Prose is a form of language that possesses ordinary syntax and natural speech rather than rhythmic structure; in which regard, along with its measurement in sentences rather than lines, it differs from poetry. [9]  On the historical development of prose, Richard Graff notes that ”

Novel : a long fictional prose narrative.

Novella :The novella exists between the novel and short story; the publisher Melville House classifies it as “too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story.” [10]

Short story : a dilemma in defining the “short story” as a literary form is how to, or whether one should, distinguish it from any short narrative. Apart from its distinct size, various theorists have suggested that the short story has a characteristic subject matter or structure; [11]   these discussions often position the form in some relation to the novel. [12]

Drama is literature intended for performance. [13]

Leitch  et al. ,  The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism , 28  ↵

Ross, “The Emergence of “Literature”: Making and Reading the English Canon in the Eighteenth Century,” 406 & Eagleton,  Literary theory: an introduction , 16  ↵

“POETRY, N.”.  OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY . OUP. RETRIEVED 13 FEBRUARY 2014. (subscription required)  ↵

Preminger,  The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics , 938–9  ↵

Ross, “The Emergence of “Literature”: Making and Reading the English Canon in the Eighteenth Century”, 398  ↵

FINNEGAN, RUTH H. (1977). ORAL POETRY: ITS NATURE, SIGNIFICANCE, AND SOCIAL CONTEXT. INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS. P. 66. & MAGOUN, JR., FRANCIS P. (1953). “ORAL-FORMULAIC CHARACTER OF ANGLO-SAXON NARRATIVE POETRY”.SPECULUM 28 (3): 446–67. DOI:10.2307/2847021  ↵

Preminger,  The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics , 938–9 &Alison Booth; Kelly J. Mays. “Glossary: P”. LitWeb , the Norton Introduction to Literature Studyspace . Retrieved 15 February 2014.   ↵

Antrim, Taylor (2010). “In Praise of Short”. The Daily Beast. Retrieved 15 February 2014.  ↵

ROHRBERGER, MARY; DAN E. BURNS (1982). “SHORT FICTION AND THE NUMINOUS REALM: ANOTHER ATTEMPT AT DEFINITION”.  MODERN FICTION STUDIES . XXVIII (6). & MAY, CHARLES (1995).  THE SHORT STORY. THE REALITY OF ARTIFICE . NEW YORK: TWAIN.  ↵

Marie Louise Pratt (1994). Charles May, ed.  The Short Story: The Long and the Short of It . Athens: Ohio UP.  ↵

Elam, Kier (1980).  The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama . London and New York: Methuen. p. 98.ISBN 0-416-72060-9.  ↵

LICENSES AND ATTRIBUTIONS CC LICENSED CONTENT, SHARED PREVIOUSLY

Literature. Provided by: Wikipedia. Located at:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature#cite_note-44 . License:  CC BY-SA: Attribution- ShareAlike

PUBLIC DOMAIN CONTENT: Image of man formed by words. Authored by: Guillaume Apollinaire. Located at:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Calligramme.jpg . License:  Public Domain: No Known Copyright

Listen to this Discussion of the poetry of Harris Khalique . You might want to take a look at the transcript as you listen.

The first half of a 2008 reading featuring four Latino poets, as part of the American Perspectives series at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Listen to poetry reading of Francisco Aragón and Brenda Cárdenas

Listen to this conversation with Allison Hedge Coke, Linda Hogan and Sherwin Bitsui . You might want to look at the transcript as you listen. In this program, we hear a conversation among three Native American poets: Allison Hedge Coke, Linda Hogan and Sherwin Bitsui. Allison Hedge Coke grew up listening to her Father’s traditional stories as she moved from Texas to North Carolina to Canada and the Great Plains. She is the author of several collections of poetry and the memoir, Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer. She has worked as a mentor with Native Americans and at-risk youth, and is currently a Professor of Poetry and Writing at the University of Nebraska, Kearney. Linda Hogan is a prolific poet, novelist and essayist. Her work is imbued with an indigenous sense of history and place, while it explores environmental, feminist and spiritual themes. A former professor at the University of Colorado, she is currently the Chickasaw Nation’s Writer in Residence. She lives in Oklahoma, where she researches and writes about Chickasaw history, mythology and ways of life. Sherwin Bitsui grew up on the Navajo reservation in Arizona. He speaks Dine, the Navajo language and participates in ceremonial activities. His poetry has a sense of the surreal, combining images of the contemporary urban culture, with Native ritual and myth.

Remember to return to the essential questions. Can expand on any of your answers to these questions? You might want to research these poets.

Chris Abani : Stories from Africa

In this deeply personal talk, Nigerian writer Chris Abani says that “what we know about how to be who we are” comes from stories. He searches for the heart of Africa through its poems and narrative, including his own.

Listen to Isabel Allende’s Ted Talk

As a novelist and memoirist, Isabel Allende writes of passionate lives, including her own. Born into a Chilean family with political ties, she went into exile in the United States in the 1970s—an event that, she believes, created her as a writer. Her voice blends sweeping narrative with touches of magical realism; her stories are romantic, in the very best sense of the word. Her novels include The House of the Spirits, Eva Luna and The Stories of Eva Luna, and her latest, Maya’s Notebook and Ripper. And don’t forget her adventure trilogy for young readers— City of the Beasts, Kingdom of the Golden Dragon and Forest of the Pygmies.

As a memoirist, she has written about her vision of her lost Chile, in My Invented Country, and movingly tells the story of her life to her own daughter, in Paula. Her book Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses memorably linked two sections of the bookstore that don’t see much crossover: Erotica and Cookbooks. Just as vital is her community work: The Isabel Allende Foundation works with nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area and Chile to empower and protect women and girls—understanding that empowering women is the only true route to social and economic justice.

You can read excerpts of her books online here: https://www.isabelallende.com/en/books

Read her musings. Why does she write? https://www.isabelallende.com/en/musings

You might choose to read one of her novels.

Listen to Novelist Chimamanda Adichie . She speaks about how our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. She tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

One Hundred Years of Solitu de

Gabriel García Márquez’s novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” brought Latin American literature to the forefront of the global imagination and earned García Márquez the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. What makes the novel so remarkable? Francisco Díez-Buzo investigates.

Answer these questions as you listen:

How many generations of the Buendía family are in One Hundred Years of Solitude?

In what year did Gabriel García Marquez start writing One Hundred Years of Solitude?

Who inspired the style of One Hundred Years of Solitude?

A Colonel Aureliano Buendía

B Gabriel García Márquez

C Nicolás Ricardo Márquez

D Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes

Which real-life event is almost directly represented in the novel?

A The Banana Massacre of 1928

B The Venezuelan coup d’état of 1958

C The Thousand Days’ War

D The bogotazo

What is the name of the town where the novel is set?

A Aracataca

Please explain how One Hundred Years of Solitude exemplifies the genre of magical realism.

What were the key influences in García Márquez’s life that helped inspire One Hundred Years of Solitude?

The narrative moves in a particular shape. What is that shape? How is that shape created?

Gabriel García Márquez was a writer and journalist who recorded the haphazard political history of Latin American life through his fiction. He was a part of a literary movement called the  Latin American “boom ,” which included writers like Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa, Argentina’s Julio Cortázar, and Mexico’s Carlos Fuentes. Almost all of these writers  incorporated aspects of magical realism in their work . Later authors, such as Isabel Allende and Salman Rushdie, would carry on and adapt the genre to the cultural and historical experiences of other countries and continents. García Máruqez hadn’t always planned on being a writer, but a pivotal moment in Colombia’s—and Latin America’s—history changed all that. In 1948, when García Márquez was a law student in Bogotá,  Jorge Eliécer Gaítan , a prominent radical populist leader of Colombia’s Liberal Party, was assassinated. This happened while the U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall brought together leaders from across the Americas to create the  Organization of American States  (OAS) and to build a hemisphere-wide effort against communism. In the days after the assassination, massive riots, now called the  bogotazo , occurred. The worst Colombian civil war to date, known as  La Violencia ,  also broke out. Another law student, visiting from Cuba, was deeply affected by Eliécer Gaítan’s death. This student’s name was Fidel Castro. Interestingly, García Márquez and Castro—both socialists—would  become close friends later on in life , despite not meeting during these tumultuous events. One Hundred Years of Solitude ’s success almost didn’t happen, but this  article  from  Vanity Fair  helps explain how a long-simmering idea became an international sensation. When Gabriel García Márquez won the Nobel Prize in 1982, he gave a  lecture  that helped illuminate the plights that many Latin Americans faced on a daily basis. Since then, that lecture has also helped explain the political and social critiques deeply embedded in his novels. It was famous for being an indigenous overview of how political violence became entrenched in Latin America during the Cold War.In an  interview  with the  New Left Review , he discussed a lot of the inspirations for his work, as well as his political beliefs.

Don Quixote

Mounting his skinny steed, Don Quixote charges an army of giants. It is his duty to vanquish these behemoths in the name of his beloved lady, Dulcinea. There’s only one problem: the giants are merely windmills. What is it about this tale of the clumsy yet valiant knight that makes it so beloved? Ilan Stavans investigates.

Why do Don Quixote and Sancho Panza work well together?

A They eat at strange times of the day

B They are impatient

C They like to dance together

D Their characters complement each other

Why does Don Quixote want to fix the world?

A He is a knight who believes in social justice

B He reads many books

C He doesn’t have any friends

D He loves toys

Why is Don Quixote’s love for Dulcinea described as “platonic”?

A Plato is their matchmaker

B They love Greek philosophy

C They want material fortune

D It’s purely spiritual

Why is Cervantes’s book described as “the first modern novel”?

A It was originally adapted to television

B The characters evolve throughout the story

C Cervantes only wrote poetry before

D It refers to technological advances

What does the term “quixotic” mean?

B A person without money

C An old man

D A dreamer

In what ways do Don Quixote and Sancho Panza change as the plot progresses?

Is it possible to count the total number of days that pass during their journey?

In what ways does their journey reveal the changes that 17th-century Spain is also undergoing?

Interested in exploring the world of  Don Quixote ? Check out  this translation  of the thrill-seeking classic. To learn more about  Don Quixote ’s rich cultural history, click  here . In  this interview , the educator shares his inspiration behind his book  Quixote: The Novel and the World . The travails of  Don Quixote ’s protagonist were heavily shaped by real-world events in 17th-century Spain. This  article  provides detailed research on what, exactly, happened during that time.

Midnight’s Children

It begins with a countdown. A woman goes into labor as the clock ticks towards midnight. Across India, people wait for the declaration of independence after nearly 200 years of British rule. At the stroke of midnight, an infant and two new nations are born in perfect synchronicity. These events form the foundation of “Midnight’s Children.” Iseult Gillespie explores Salman Rushdie’s dazzling novel.

Saleem Sinai’s birth coincides with:

A The invasion of India by the British

B The end of British occupation and the creation of two new nations, India and Pakistan

C The death of his mother

D His discovery of magic powers

Midnight’s Children is set over the course of:

A About thirty years of Saleem’s life

B A single day in Saleem’s life

C The duration of British occupation

D About thirty years of Saleem’s life, as well as flashbacks to before he was born

Saleem is the only person in the book with magic powers

Saleem has powers of

A Telepathy

B Shape shifting

C Predicting the future

Midnight’s Children is full of cultural references, including

A 1001 Nights

D Mythology

E All of the above

List some of the historical events that are part of the plot of Midnight’s Children

Why is Midnight’s Children a work of postcolonial literature? Describe some of the features of postcolonial literature.

In addition to being a work of postcolonial literature, Midnight’s Children is considered a key work of magical realism. Why do you think this is? What are some of the features of the book that could classify as magical realism?

Midnight’s Children filters epic and complex histories through one man’s life. What are the benefits of fictionalizing history in this way? What do you think he is trying to tell us about the way we process our past? Can history be as much of a narrative construct as fiction?

At the stroke of midnight, the first gasp of a newborn syncs with the birth of two new nations. These simultaneous events are at the center of Midnight’s Children, a dazzling novel about the state of modern India by the British-Indian author  Salman Rushdie . You can listen to an interview with Rushdie discussing the novel  here . The chosen baby is Saleem Sinai, who narrates the novel from a pickle factory in 1977. As  this article  argues, much of the beauty of the narrative lies in Rushdie’s ability to weave the personal into the political in surprising ways. Saleem’s narrative leaps back in time, to trace his family history from 1915 on. The family tree is blossoming with bizarre scenes, including clandestine courtships, babies swapped at birth, and cryptic prophecies. For a detailed interactive timeline of the historical and personal events threaded through the novel,  click here . However, there’s one trait that can’t be explained by genes alone – Saleem has magic powers, and they’re somehow related to the time of his birth. For an overview of the use of magical realism and astonishing powers in Mignight’s Children,  click here. Saleem recounts a new nation, flourishing and founding after almost a century of British rule. For more information on the dark history of British occupation of India,  visit this page. The vast historical frame is one reason why Midnight’s Children is considered one of the most illuminating works of  postcolonial literature  ever written. This genre typically addresses life in formerly colonized countries, and explores the fallout through themes like revolution, migration, and identity. Postcolonial literature also deals with the search for agency and authenticity in the wake of imposed foreign rule. Midnight’s Children reflects these concerns with its explosive combination of Eastern and Western references. On the one hand, it’s been compared to the sprawling novels of Charles Dickens or George Elliot, which also offer a panoramic vision of society paired with tales of personal development. But Rushdie radically disrupts this formula by adding Indian cultural references, magic and myth. Saleem writes the story by night, and narrates it back to his love interest, Padma. This echoes the frame for  1001 Nights , a collection of Middle Eastern folktales told by Scheherazade every night to her lover – and as Saleem reminds us, 1001 is “the number of night, of magic, of alternative realities.” Saleem spends a lot of the novel attempting to account for the unexpected. But he often gets thoroughly distracted and goes on astonishing tangents, telling dirty jokes or mocking his enemies. With his own powers of telepathy, Saleem forges connections between other children of midnight; including a boy who can step through time and mirrors, and a child who changes their gender when immersed in water. There’s other flashes of magic throughout, from a mother who can see into dreams to witchdoctors, shapeshifters, and many more. For an overview of the dazzling reference points of the novel,  visit this page . Sometimes, all this is like reading a rollercoaster: Saleem sometimes narrates separate events all at once, refers to himself in the first and third person in the space of a single sentence, or uses different names for one person. And Padma is always interrupting, urging him to get to the point or exclaiming at his story’s twists and turns. This mind-bending approach has garnered continuing fascination and praise. Not only did Midnight’s Children win the prestigious Man Booker prize in its year of publication,  but it was named the best of all the winners in 2008 . For an interview about Rushdie’s outlook and processed,  click here. All this gives the narrative a breathless quality, and brings to life an entire society surging through political upheaval without losing sight of the marvels of individual lives. But even as he depicts the cosmological consequences of a single life, Rushdie questions the idea that we can ever condense history into a single narrative.

Tom Elemas : The Inspiring Truth in Fiction

What do we lose by choosing non-fiction over fiction? For Tomas Elemans, there’s an important side effect of reading fiction: empathy — a possible antidote to a desensitized world filled with tragic news and headlines.

What is empathy? How does story-telling create empathy? What stories trigger empathy in you? What is narrative immersion? Are we experiencing an age of narcissism? What might be some examples of narcissism? What connection does Tom Elemans make to individualism?

Ann Morgan: My year reading a book from every country in the world

Ann Morgan considered herself well read — until she discovered the “massive blindspot” on her bookshelf. Amid a multitude of English and American authors, there were very few books from beyond the English-speaking world. So she set an ambitious goal: to read one book from every country in the world over the course of a year. Now she’s urging other Anglophiles to read translated works so that publishers will work harder to bring foreign literary gems back to their shores. Explore interactive maps of her reading journey here: go.ted.com/readtheworld

Her blog: Check out my blog (http://ayearofreadingtheworld.com/), where you can find a complete list of the books I read, and what I learned along the way.

Jacqueline Woodson: What reading slowly taught me about writing

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Short : an international anthology of five centuries of short-short stories, prose poems, brief essays, and other short prose forms

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Prose Fiction

1. Introduction

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1 In one form or another, stories are part of everyone’s lives. We are constantly telling each other stories, usually about events that happen to us or to people we know. These are usually not invented stories, but they are stories nonetheless. And we would not be able to make sense of our world and our lives without them.

2 We also enjoy reading, watching, or listening to stories that we know are not true, but whose characters, places, and events spark our imagination and allow us to experience different worlds as if they were our own. These are the kind of stories we call ‘fiction.’ Many people like to watch series or soap operas on TV. And even more people like to watch movies, whether in the cinema or streamed to their laptop or smartphone. Video games, comics and manga, songs and musicals, stage plays, and YouTube blogs, they all tell stories in their own ways. But if there is one medium that has shown itself particularly well-suited to tell engaging and lasting stories throughout the ages, it is written language. It is fair to say, then, that stories, and most particularly fictions, in their various forms and genres, constitute the backbone of literature.

3 In this chapter, we will introduce some basic ideas about storytelling, and in particular about the narrative forms of literature and the ways in which they create meaning. We will also present the main genres into which literary narratives have been divided historically, and how these genres have evolved from their origins until today. We will then try to define and frame the two genres of prose fiction that are more common nowadays and from which we will draw the examples in this textbook: short stories and novels.

4 Not everyone approaches these genres in the same way. Here, we will follow a semiotic model to study and interpret narrative structure and meaning. In order to understand this model, it is essential to grasp the distinction between story and discourse, which will guide our discussions throughout the book. To conclude this chapter, we will consider how short stories and novels spread beyond the written word and become interconnected with other media in contemporary culture.

1.1 What Is Narrative?

5 Narrative is notoriously difficult to define with precision. But even before we attempt a working definition of the concept, we already know that it refers to storytelling. The term itself comes from the Latin word narro , which means ‘to tell.’In English, to narrate means to tell a story. According to many anthropologists, this ability is universal amongst human beings. 1 All peoples, everywhere and throughout history, tell each other stories, or, as they are technically called, narratives. As the semiotician and literary critic Roland Barthes once wrote,

The narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances — as though any material were fit to receive man’s stories. Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting, stained-glass windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there has never been a people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their narratives, enjoyment of which is very often shared by men with different, even opposing, cultural backgrounds. Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself. 2

6 For the purpose of this book, we will define narrative as the semiotic representation of a sequence of events, meaningfully connected by time and cause. 3 This definition highlights certain key elements shared by all forms of narrative:

Narratives are semiotic representations , that is, they are made of material signs (written or spoken words, moving or still images, etc.) which convey or stand for meanings that need to be decoded or interpreted by the receiver.

Narratives present a sequence of events , that is, they connect at least two events (actions, happenings, incidents, etc.) in a common structure or organised whole.

Narratives connect events by time and cause , that is, they organise the sequence of events based on their relationship in time (‘Hear the sweet cuckoo. Through the big-bamboo thicket, the full moon filters.’ 4 ), as cause and effect (‘Into the old pond, a frog suddenly plunges. The sound of water.’ 5 ), or, in most narratives, by both temporal and causal relationships.

Narratives are meaningful , that is, they have meaning for both senders and receivers, although these meanings do not need to be the same.

7 As this definition suggests, narrative is the fundamental way in which we humans make sense of our existence. Without effort, we connect everything that happens in our lifeworld (events) as a temporal or causal sequence, and most often as both. In order to understand our lives and the world around us, we need to tell ourselves and each other meaningful stories. Even our perception of things that appear to be static inevitably involves making up stories. 6 Are you able to look at the picture in Figure 1.1 below without seeing a connected sequence of events, a narrative, in it?

Fig. 1.1 Collision of Costa Concordia, cropped (2012).

By Roberto Vongher, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Collision_of_Costa_Concordia_5_crop.jpg

8 Genres are conventional groupings of texts (or other semiotic representations) based on certain shared features. These groupings, which have been used since ancient times by writers, readers, and critics, serve a variety of functions:

Classification : By identifying the features that are worthy of attention, genres help us to place a particular text among similar texts and distinguish it from most other texts.

Prescription : Genres institute standards and rules that guide writers in their work. Sometimes these rules are actively enforced (normative genres), while at other times they act simply as established customs.

Interpretation : These same standards and rules help readers to interpret texts, by providing them with shared conventions and expectations about the different texts they might encounter.

Evaluation : Critics also use these standards and rules when they set about judging the artistic quality of a text, by comparing it with other texts in the same genre.

9 Already in Ancient Greece and Rome, narrative was a major literary genre ( epic ), distinct from poetic song ( lyric ) and stage performance ( drama ). Other generic classifications, particularly those related to the content of the story (tragedy, comedy, pastoral, satire, etc.), were also commonly used. But the basic classification of poetic forms at the time, established by Plato and Aristotle, was based on whether the poet told the story ( diegesis ) or the story was represented or imitated by actors ( mimesis ).

10 While Classical and Neoclassical poetics thought of genres as fixed and preordained forms that poets needed to abide by, modern literary theory, starting with the Romantic period, has come to see genres as dynamic and loosely defined conventions. Genres change and evolve through time. Different cultures define and institute different genres. In fact, modern literature has seen a significant expansion of genres, as a visit to any bookstore or online bookseller will attest (see Fig. 1.2).

11 Genres are continuously evolving across many different dimensions, such as content, style, form, etc. They are often organised at different levels of subordination, in hierarchies or taxonomies of genres and subgenres. Nowadays, for example, the following generic distinctions are commonly used to classify stories:

Fiction vs. nonfiction (based on whether the events and the characters of the story are invented or taken from reality).

Prose vs. verse (based on the literary technique used to tell the story).

Narrative vs. drama (based on whether the story is told or shown).

Novel, novella, or short story (based on the length of the story).

Adventure, fantasy, romance, humour, science-fiction, crime, etc. (based on the content of the story).

Fig. 1.2 El Ateneo Gran Splendid. A theatre converted into a bookshop. Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Photo by Galio, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Buenos_Aires_-_Recoleta_-_El_Ateneo_ex_Grand_Splendid_2.JPG

12 These and many other generic classifications allow us to impose some order on the vast number of stories that are published every year. But they are not set in stone and are certainly not eternal. Following the disposition of writers, readers, and critics, new genres appear and disappear, often combining the characteristics of previous texts or developing from the ambiguous boundaries of existing genres, as with the blending of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ into ‘faction’ (or nonfiction novel). 7 There is little doubt that novels and short stories are the most popular narrative fiction genres in contemporary literature. Like all genres, however, they appeared at some point in history and will only last as long as people are interested in writing and reading them.

1.3 Prose Fiction

13 Prose is text written or spoken with the pattern of ordinary or everyday language, without a metrical structure. Verse, on the other hand, is written or spoken with an arranged metrical rhythm, and often a rhyme. While narrative fiction composed in verse was very common in the past, modern writers overwhelmingly tell their stories in prose, to the point that most readers today would be baffled if they encountered fiction written in verse.

14 By far, the most popular genres of prose fiction nowadays are novels and short stories. The distinction between the two is fairly simple and straightforward: short stories are short, novels are long. Any other difference that we might be able to find between these two genres of narrative is derived in one way or another from this simple fact.

15 But before identifying certain key differences, it is important to understand that both short stories and novels are modern narrative genres, which only emerged in their current forms during the European Renaissance. 8 Of course, people had been telling each other fictional stories in other forms since much earlier and in many other places. Perhaps the two forms that had the strongest influence on the emergence of these modern genres of prose fiction were the Classical epic poems, most particularly Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey , and the Hebrew Bible, which is filled with a wide variety of short stories.

16 During the European Renaissance, these and other influences stimulated many writers to produce fictional narratives in prose using vernacular languages (instead of Latin), so that they could reach a growing audience of readers. These narratives were not intended to be read aloud, like epic poems or other forms of poetry and drama, but silently, as part of an intimate experience between the reader and the text. 9 Initially, these new narratives, inspired in Middle Eastern and Indian storytelling, tended to be short and were often published as a collection, like Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353, Fig. 1.3). Contemporaries referred to them as novelle (singular, novella ), which means ‘new’ in Italian and is a term still in use today to refer to short novels. From the perspective of Western culture, these early novelle are the first modern forms of prose fiction.

17 A little later in the Renaissance, some authors began to extend these novelle into longer stories that occupied the whole book with the adventures of a single protagonist. In this way, what we now call the novel was born. The first modern novel, according to most, is Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605, Fig. 1.4), the tragicomic story of a deluded country squire who tries to revive the heroic lifestyle depicted in fictional books of chivalry. We should not forget, however, that long narratives, similar in many ways to modern novels, had already been written and read in different cultures throughout history. For example, Lucius Apuleius’ The Golden Ass (ca. 170), Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe (2nd century), Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji (1010), Ramon Llull’s Blanquerna (1283), or Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms (ca. 1321), amongst many others.

Fig. 1.3 Boccaccio, Decameron : ‘The Story of the Marchioness of Montferrat, ’ 15th century.

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Decameron_BNF_MS_Italien_63_f_22v.jpeg

18 Due to their difference in length, short stories and novels also tend to differ from each other in certain respects:

Short stories need to focus on a few characters, a limited number of environments, and just one sequence of events. They cannot afford to digress or add unnecessary complications to the plot. Density, concentration, and precision are essential elements of good short-story writing.

Novels, on the other hand, can explore many different characters, environments, and events. The story can be enriched with subplots and complications that add perspective, dynamism, and interest to the novel. Characters have room to evolve and the author can introduce digressions and commentary without undermining the form. Scope, breadth, and sweep are essential elements of good novel writing.

Fig. 1.4. Title page of the first edition of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605).

Biblioteca Digital Hispánica, Public Domain, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote#/media/File:El_ingenioso_hidalgo_don_Quijote_de_la_Mancha.jpg

19 This does not mean that the novel is better or worse than the short story. They are simply different forms of narrative, both well adapted to achieve their own purposes. While the novel can recreate a fictional world in all its complexity and vastness, the short story is able to shine a sharper light on a particular character or situation.

Fig. 1.5 Semiotic model of narrative.

By Ignasi Ribó, CC BY.

1.4 Story and Discourse

20 The systematic study of narratives in order to understand their structure (how they work) and function (what they are for) is called narratology. 10 This field has developed a set of conceptual tools that allow us to discern with more clarity and precision the process through which narratives are meaningful for writers and readers. Narratology is closely linked with semiotics, the study of meaning-making processes, and in particular the use of signs and signifying systems to communicate meanings. In this sense, it is important to realise that narratological models are not so much concerned with explaining individual narratives, but rather they attempt to identify the underlying semiotic system that makes narrative production and reception possible. 11

21 The semiotic or communicative model of narrative that will be developed in this textbook (see Fig. 1.5) begins by distinguishing the real people who participate in the communicative act of writing and reading (the real author and the real reader) from their textual or implied counterparts.

22 Thus, the ‘implied author’ 12 is not the actual individual who wrote the book, but a projection of that individual in the book itself. For instance, Ernest Hemingway (Fig. 1.6) was born in 1899, wrote novels like The Old Man and the Sea and short stories like ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro, ’ and died in 1961. When we read one of his narratives, we are not listening to him telling us a story (how could we?), but to a virtual persona to whom we can attribute a style, attitudes, and values, based on what we find in the text itself.

23 Similarly, although we are the actual readers, the text does not address us as particular individuals. Otherwise, every book could only have a single intended receiver and the rest of us would be eavesdroppers. But books, unlike letters, are generally addressed to an abstract or generic receiver. We can define the notion of ‘implied reader’ 13 as the virtual persona to whom the implied author is addressing the narrative, as can be deduced from the text itself. When anyone of us, at any time, picks up a Hemingway novel or short story and starts to read it, we are effectively stepping into the shoes of its implied reader.

Fig. 1.6 Ernest Hemingway posing for a dust-jacket photo by Lloyd Arnold for the first edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), at Sun Valley Lodge, Idaho, 1939.

By Lloyd Arnold, Public Domain, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ErnestHemingway.jpg

24 Once we move into the narrative text itself, which already contains an implied author and an implied reader, both only circumstantially related to human beings in the real world, we need to distinguish two different levels of communication: discourse and story . 14

25 At one level, there is the message that the implied author sends to the implied reader. We will call this message ‘discourse.’ Narrative discourse is the means through which the narrative is communicated by the implied author to the implied reader. It includes elements like:

Narration (narrator and narratee, point of view, etc.)

26 The content of narrative discourse is a ‘story.’ But the story is not told directly by the implied author to the implied reader. It is the narrator (a figure of discourse) who tells the story to a narratee (another figure of discourse). Sometimes, narrators and narratees are also characters in the story, but at other times they are not. Therefore, we cannot say that narrators or narratees are people, nor even characters. Both exist only in narrative discourse. The story, then, is simply what the narrator communicates to the narratee (see Fig. 1.7). It includes elements like:

Fig. 1.7 Semiotic model of narrative shown in speech bubbles.

Events (plot)

Environments (setting)

Characters (characterisation)

27 In the next chapters, we will examine all these elements in more detail. First, we will look at the key elements of story: plot, setting, and characterisation. Then, we will examine the key elements of discourse: narration, language, and theme. While reading these chapters it is important to keep in mind the fundamental distinction between story and discourse, without which many aspects of narrative fiction cannot be properly understood.

1.5 Beyond Literature

28 As we have seen, narratives are not confined to literary works. Certainly, novels and short stories have been the privileged vehicles of storytelling since the European Renaissance until the present day. But the invention of other media, such as cinema, television, or the Internet, has been rapidly changing the way people produce and consume narratives.

29 During the twentieth century, cinema developed into an alternative medium to tell the kind of stories that previously were the domain of novels or plays. Like novels, movies are narratives that present a sequence of events connected by time and cause. Unlike novels, however, movies are not meant to be read, but to be watched. In this sense, movies are like theatre plays: they show a performance of the events, environments, and characters of the story, rather than having a narrator convey those events, environments, and characters through words. Of course, cinema is not completely like drama, because the camera, by selecting and framing the events presented in the narrative, acts in some ways like a narrator. In fact, we may well consider cinema a new narrative form, one that draws both from the epic (prose fiction) and dramatic (stage play) genres. 15

30 The intimate relationship between literary and cinematographic narratives is clearly shown by the fact that many movies have tried to retell the stories found in prose fiction. In general, a narrative based on a story previously presented in a different medium is called an adaptation. In some cases, prose fictions are also adaptations, for example when they take their stories from journalistic accounts, history books, or even movies. Much more common, however, is for movies to attempt to bring successful novels and short stories to the screen. For example, J.K. Rowling’s series of novels about the adventures of the young wizard Harry Potter and his friends has been adapted into popular movies by Hollywood (see Fig. 1.8). Television has also drawn many of its fictions from literary narratives. One example is the adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s series of medieval fantasy novels A Song of Ice and Fire into a successful television show, Game of Thrones .

Fig. 1.8 Warner Bros. Studio Tour London: The Making of Harry Potter.

Photo by Karen Roe, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Making_of_Harry_Potter_29-05-2012_(7528990230).jpg

31 Adaptations are always the subject of passionate debate and controversy. Many attempts to adapt great novels to cinema or television have been negatively received by spectators, who decry the lack of respect for the original story or find the movie less engaging and pleasing than the novel. Less frequently, film adaptations are acclaimed by spectators and critics as superior to the novels or short stories that inspired them.

32 What most people tend to forget is that adaptations are not translations of the original works. Rather, an adaptation is always an interpretation. In the same way that two readers will never read the same novel, because their interpretation of the events, environments, and characters represented in the story will be different, an adaptation is necessarily a subjective reading of the original text. Moreover, adaptations are creative interpretations, because they produce new texts or semiotic representations (cinema, television, comic, videoclip, etc.) driven by their own artistic motivations and structural constraints.

33 The fact is that stories cannot be contained in any particular medium or restricted to any predetermined set of rules. Once they have been told, in whatever form or shape, and as long as people pay attention to them, they become part of our cultural makeup. People are free to read them and use them as they like, whether it is for their own private enjoyment, or to adapt, transform, and share them with others. These adaptations may try to be as faithful as possible to what the adapter thinks is the original intention of the author or the true meaning of the text. But they can also subvert those meanings through irony, humour, and commentary, like the memes that proliferate in the Internet era. At the end of the day, stories are not there to be revered and conserved in a state of purity. They constitute the fundamental means by which we humans give meaning to our world. And as such, they are always open to new interpretations. 16

34 • Narrative is the semiotic representation of a sequence of events, meaningfully connected by time and cause. Literary narratives use written language to represent the connected sequence of events.

35 • There are many ways to classify literary narratives into different genres, according, for example, to the truthfulness of the events (fiction and nonfiction), to the way the story is told (prose and verse), to the length of the story (novel and short story), or to the content of the story (adventure, science-fiction, fantasy, romance, etc.).

36 • Prose fiction is narrative written without a metrical pattern that tells an imaginary or invented story. The most common genres of prose fiction in modern literature are novels and short stories. Novels tend to be much longer than short stories.

37 • The semiotic model of narrative, developed in the field of narratology, makes a key distinction between discourse (how the narrative is conveyed from the implied author to the implied reader) and story (what the narrator tells the narratee).

38 • Prose fictions are part of the manifold narratives that we humans use to communicate relevant meanings to each other through a wide variety of media, such as film, television, comics, etc.

Bibliographie

Des DOI sont automatiquement ajoutés aux références bibliographiques par Bilbo, l’outil d’annotation bibliographique d’OpenEdition. Ces références bibliographiques peuvent être téléchargées dans les formats APA, Chicago et MLA.

Cette bibliographie a été enrichie de toutes les références bibliographiques automatiquement générées par Bilbo en utilisant Crossref.

Abbott, H. Porter, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511816932

Bal, Mieke, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto, CA: University of Toronto Press, 2017).

Barthes, Roland, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative, ’ in A Roland Barthes Reader , ed. by Susan Sontag, trans. by Stephen Heath (London, UK: Vintage, 1994), pp. 251–95.

Bascom, William, ‘The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives, ’ The Journal of American Folklore , 78: 307 (1965), 3–20.

Booth, Wayne C., The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

Buchanan, Daniel Crump, One Hundred Famous Haiku (Tokyo: Japan Publications, 1973).

Burroway, Janet, Writing Fiction: AGuide to Narrative Craft (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226616728.001.0001

Chatman, Seymour Benjamin, Reading Narrative Fiction (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1993).

Chatman, Seymour Benjamin, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).

Cobley, Paul, Narrative (London, UK: Routledge, 2014).

Eco, Umberto, The Open Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

Herman, David, Basic Elements of Narrative (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444305920

Iser, Wolfgang, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

Johansen, Jørgen Dines, Literary Discourse: A Semiotic-Pragmatic Approach to Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442676725

Lodge, David, The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts (New York, NY: Viking, 1993).

Manguel, Alberto, A History of Reading (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2014).

Onega Jaén, Susana, and José Angel García Landa, eds., Narratology: An Introduction (London, UK: Routledge, 1996), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315843018

Stam, Robert, Film Theory: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000).

Notes de bas de page

1 See, for example, William Bascom, ‘The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives, ’ The Journal of American Folklore , 78: 307 (1965), 3–20.

2 Roland Barthes, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative, ’ in A Roland Barthes Reader , ed. by Susan Sontag, trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Vintage, 1994), pp. 251–52.

3 Based on Narratology: An Introduction , ed. by Susana Onega Jaén and José Angel García Landa (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 3, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315843018

4 Haiku by Matsuo Bashō, in Daniel Crump Buchanan, One Hundred Famous Haiku (Tokyo: Japan Publications, 1973), p. 87.

5 Haiku by Matsuo Bashō, in Buchanan, p. 88.

6 H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511816932

7 See David Lodge, The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts (New York, NY: Viking, 1993), p. 203.

8 For a detailed history, see Paul Cobley, Narrative (London, UK: Routledge, 2014).

9 Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2014).

10 See Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017).

11 David Herman, Basic Elements of Narrative (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444305920 ; Jørgen Dines Johansen, Literary Discourse: A Semiotic-Pragmatic Approach to Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), https://doi . org /10.3138/9781442676725

12 Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

13 Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

14 See Seymour Benjamin Chatman, Reading Narrative Fiction (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1993); Seymour Benjamin Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).

15 See Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000).

16 Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

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“ eleven years of hope ” by victor david.

🏆 Winner of Contest #265

When the doctors asked him if he wanted to hop into a frying pan, Alexander of Severe Level III, long acquainted with doctor tongue, knew they meant they wanted to trial a new drug or a new treatment. Alexander said okay because he was tired of being shut up all day in the institution, and wanted to travel to the testing lab. More importantly, he had lost a central piece of himself to shrapnel when he stepped on a landmine eleven years earlier, and continued to perplex what was left of his cerebral cortex with the hope of its recovery.The do...

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Nobody at NASA gave a goddamn about the weather in Jersey. This fact, as true and as simple as it was, had not stopped my Aunt Rosie from pacing around the parlor all morning and pressing her face to the front window in search of thunderstorms. My mother had yelled at her for smearing rouge on the glass, and she, of course, had yelled right back. And soon, everybody was yelling. It was the day of my brother Eddie’s wedding, the day of the moon landing, and rain meant a lot of things. It meant a shower of good fortune, pouring out from G...

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“ Petrified ” by Eliza Entwistle

🏆 Winner of Contest #263

You would never have noticed it if you weren’t looking for it. That was precisely the point.The instructions given in my embroidery group had been clear enough: After nightfall, take a stroll on the second lane past the bakery, look for the unlit lamppost and turn down that dark alley, they said in hushed voices, as the pianist began playing in sudden loud fervor, by coincidence. Then you will see a mossy stone staircase, which you will descend, and at the end of it there is a dim hallway. She lives through the set of green doors on the left...

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I didn’t know there could be a day too hot for planes to fly but I guess I should’ve, because lord knows it’s entirely too hot for anything else to happen. I figured I should still take the dog out but honestly as soon as I opened the door, he looked at me with these doleful eyes like, Are you kidding me? Makes sense. I was ready to crawl out of my underwear and just walk around with a creatively placed fig leaf or something, so you gotta figure it’s even worse for a furry guy. When we went back in, I dug an old t-shirt out of the ...

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We were death partners before we were friends. The day we met some 30 years ago, I was so pregnant with my first child, I resembled an over-stuffed sausage about to burst its casing. I’d forsaken style weeks earlier when my shoes no longer fit. I couldn’t even reach around my massive torso to shave my legs; limbs sporting enough hair to scrape clean a barbecue grill.  You, on the other hand, had just wrapped-up an open-house and strode across my threshold for the first time, like a seasoned runway model. I’ll never forget your chic...

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The feeling was like sinking. Gert and the counselor drifted outside her field of vision; her breath halted. Sophie knew even if she could speak, her words would go unheard. She wanted to run out of the room, but thought better of it, so she sat, head in hand as if she were concentrating.  “Are you ok?” The counselor’s voice was even, warm. The clock ticking, the sound of Gert breathing next to her on the couch, the stare of the counselor, all irritated her. She took a deep breath, looked up.  Gert said, “We all want you to be ok.”...

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 The sun was harsh today. Through the lens, the scene was black and white, harsh shadows and stark highlights. Emma adjusted the aperture to be as small as it would go, cutting out much of the glare. The relative darkness restored faint traces of flavour to the frame, revealing the detail that the sunlight had tried to hide.A family stood huddled together, centred in a flat, if competent, composition. A man, with a bright smile and dark eyes, leaning close over his children, a pair that shared his expression. Behind them stretched a vas...

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Eddie was sweating. He'd been told, before putting on the suit, to drink a ton of water, so much your stomach hurts, and he bet there was an extra ten pounds of perspiration in the cheap costume fur. It certainly smelled like it, but rule one of wearing the suit: never take off the head. "That's an automatic write up," said Rob. "If you do it, and Faye finds out you subbed in without approval, you are off weekend hours, my friend. Good luck sucking up Tuesday tips." "I get it, I get it," Eddie had insisted. "I'll stay away from French revolu...

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Trigger warning: Domestic abuse, rapeThalia wipes down the pristine kitchen countertops, impatient for the game to start. She glances at the clock, then her eye catches the pile of bills on the table. The radio blares pre-match commentary filled with praise for the footballers. She turns down the volume so it won’t wake little Gabbi. She takes a seat at the kitchen table with a sigh. Another hard shift at the hospital is behind her, but it was always worth it in the end. Today, an elderly woman hugged her and gave her a peppermint. “As ...

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For the record, I really wasn’t trying to kill myself. I know what it looks like. I grew up in the northeast; I should have known the dangers of a February night and a lakeshore buried in snow. I do remember being little, maybe five years old, and hearing my parents (bright, young, sober) discussing a boy who had frozen to death by my school. They said it was a soft, painless way to go, and that was what made February dangerous: you felt, there at the end, like you were calm and safe and even warm. You had to be smart to keep yourself from s...

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I don’t really know how to tell this story. For a start, there are some logistical difficulties – I’ll get to those later – but even without those, I don’t know how to explain it all. I guess I’ll start when we saw each other at the club after four years apart. That night, my head was pounding with noise and my heart was burning with hurt, and I’d come to the club alone – a stupid move for a girl, some part of me still said, though I hadn’t looked like a girl in public for over a year. I threw myself into the sweaty, rainbow-hued crowd prepa...

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On my last shift as a lighthouse keeper, I climbed the seventy-six spiral iron stairs and two ladders to the watch room, the number of steps the same as my age. The thwomp and snare of each step laid an ominous background score. Something wasn’t right. At that very moment, Richie Tedesco was pointing a fire extinguisher at the burning electrical panel in the engine room of his boat a few miles offshore.The placard in the watch room read “Marge Mabrity, Lightkeeper—First lighted the depths on March 2nd, 1985, and hasn’t missed a night.” Alrea...

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Short Stories from Reedsy Prompts

Short stories may be small, but they are mighty! With the weight of a novel stripped away, great short stories strike directly at the heart of their topics. Often maligned as the novel’s poor cousin, the short story medium has produced some of the most beloved works of fiction. From the eerily-accurate predictions of Ray Bradbury to the spine-chilling thrills of Stephen King and the wildly imaginative worlds of N.K. Jemison, some of the best authors in the business have made their mark writing short stories .

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