The Supporting Cast: A Study of Flat and Minor Characters - Brossura

Galef, David

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0271026359 ISBN 13: 9780271026350

Casa editrice: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993

Riassunto

For every Hamlet, there is a supporting cast; for every Mrs. Dalloway, an entire realm of subordinate portraits. Yet if literary criticism cares at all about significant detail, emergent patterns, and the subtleties in narrative, flat and minor characters are crucial to an understanding of the fictional process itself.

Beginning with E. M. Forster's landmark study of flat and round characters, this book is both a critical and writerly examination of the species: Why are certain minor characters so salient in readers' minds, and why are flat characters often so comic? Is a name enough to create a character, and if so, what is the vanishing point of characterization? The walking allegory, the narrator, the disrupter, the doppelgänger&;how are they used, and to what effect? The Supporting Cast first explores the theoretical limits of character, from structuralist taxonomies to reader-response concerns, with examples culled from a wide range of literature. The author then applies these concepts, in chapters of sustained analysis, to works of Conrad, Forster, and Woolf. The work also provides comments on flat and minor characters in other media and a full-scale character index of Woolf's Jacob's Room.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

David Galef is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Mississippi.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Pennsylvania State University Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 1993
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0271026359
• ISBN 13: 9780271026350
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 244
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile