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  • Textbook
  • © 1998

The Novel

Language and Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino

Authors:

  • The author is a major contemporary novelist. Internationally acclaimed, he has been shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize for An Instant in the Wind (976) and Rumours of Rain (978). The film of his fierce, antiapartheid novel A Dry White Season stars Donald Sutherland, Janet Suzman and Marlon Brando (last shown BBC, 7 July 997)
    A highly original reading of this major literary form by a master of the novelist's craft
    An accessible analysis of the use of language and narrative, relating the modern and postmodern novel to its eighteenthcentury roots
    Discusses a wide range of classic novels, from Cervantes to Kafka to A.S.Byatt, central to the study and understanding of European literature today

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Table of contents (16 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-viii
  2. Introduction: Languages of the Novel

    • André Brink
    Pages 1-19
  3. The Wrong Side of the Tapestry

    • André Brink
    Pages 20-45
  4. Courtly Love, Private Anguish

    • André Brink
    Pages 46-64
  5. ‘The Woman’s Snare’

    • André Brink
    Pages 65-85
  6. The Dialogic Pact

    • André Brink
    Pages 86-103
  7. Charades

    • André Brink
    Pages 104-125
  8. The Language of Scandal

    • André Brink
    Pages 126-146
  9. Quoted in Slang

    • André Brink
    Pages 147-172
  10. The Tiger’s Revenge

    • André Brink
    Pages 173-188
  11. A Room without a View

    • André Brink
    Pages 189-206
  12. The Perfect Crime

    • André Brink
    Pages 207-230
  13. Making and Unmaking

    • André Brink
    Pages 231-252
  14. Withdrawal and Return

    • André Brink
    Pages 253-268
  15. Taking the Gap

    • André Brink
    Pages 269-287
  16. Possessed by Language

    • André Brink
    Pages 288-308
  17. The Pranks of Hermes

    • André Brink
    Pages 309-329
  18. Back Matter

    Pages 330-373

About this book

The Postmodernist novel has become famous for the extremes of its narcissistic involvement with language. In this challenging and wide-ranging new study, André Brink argues that this self-consciousness has been a characteristic of the novel since its earliest stirrings. More specifically, every novel appears both to construct, and to be constructed by, its own notion of language, elaborated through all the strategies of narrative. Taking as his starting point 'the propensity for story' embedded in language, he offers stimulating new readings of novels from Cervantes to Calvino, demonstrating that in many respects the old familiar texts may be more startlingly modern, and the Postmodernist texts more firmly rooted in convention, than we tend to think.

Bibliographic Information