Foregrounded Description in Prose Fiction: Five Cross-Literary Studies

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University of Toronto Press, Dec 15, 1995 - Literary Criticism - 196 pages

In this wide-ranging study, José Manuel Lopes proposes a theoretical framework for analysing the role of description in prose fiction. He offers readings of texts drawn from four national literatures—French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilian—testing his model across a cultural and temporal spectrum. This critical breadth also illustrates the significance of description in disparate contexts: the postmodern novel, which implicitly challenges conventional notions of foreground and background, as well as the naturalist and realist fiction of the nineteenth century.

Lopes applies his model to detailed readings of Emile Zola's Une Page d'amour, Claude Simon's Histoire, Benito Pérez Galdós' La de Bringas, Cornélio Penna's A Menina Morta, and Carlos de Oliveira's Finisterra. In addition to exploring the interplay of description and narration, these readings pay particular attention to spatial descriptions, and analyse the diverse roles of description in different contexts. After subjecting each fictional text to a detailed analysis which seeks to bring out the crucial aspects that contribute towards the foregrounding of descriptive passages (e.g., mise en abyme, parody, modes of representation), and which establishes, on occasion, certain relations that literary description may entertain with the other arts, he attempts to isolate the primary functions of foregrounding descriptions. What he seeks to demonstrate is that description constitutes a major textual component necessary for the analysis and understanding of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century fictional texts.

 

Contents

Foreword
Introduction
Description and mise en abyme in Zolas Une Page
Reading of visual images and postcard descriptions
Satire and parody in Benito
Parodic emblematizations or when mise en abyme
Literal
Appendix
Descriptive narrations
Description
Eight variations on a landscape
Descriptivenarrative versus dialogical mimetic
Conclusion
Stylistic discursive and functional levels
Foregrounded description and the other arts
Bibliography

Description and modes of representation in Cornélio
Semantic polarities and descriptive modalizations

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About the author (1995)

José Manuel Lopes is a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto.

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