Robert Scholes Libri

"The book offers . . . a clutch of examples of semiotics usefully and intelligently applied, which Scholes's patient, cheerful tone and his resolutely concrete vocabulary manage to combine into a breezily informative American confection."-Terence Hawkes, Times Literary Supplement

Reexamines the development and the popular conception of narrative literature and looks at meaning, characterization, plot, and point of view in various narrative forms.

This is both an introduction to an overwhelming popular literary genre and a stimulating analysis of its literary, socal, and scientific elements. Contains detailed discussions of the most significant writers,a nd of ten representative novels from 1818 to 1976.

In The Fantastic, Tzvetan Todorov seeks to examine both generic theory and a particular genre, moving back and forth between a poetics of the fantastic itself and a metapoetics or theory of theorizing, even as he suggest that one must, as a critic, move back and forth between theory and history, between idea and fact. His work on the fantastic is indeed about a historical phenomenon that we recognize, about specific works that we may read, but it is also about the use and abuse of generic theory. As an essay in fictional poetics, The Fantastic is consciously structuralist in its approach to the generic subject. Todorov seeks linguistic bases for the structural features he notes in a variety of fantastic texts, including Potocki's The Sargasso Manuscript, Nerval's Aur lia, Balzac's The Magic Skin, the Arabian Nights, Cazotte's Le Diable Amoureux, Kafka's The Metamorphosis, and tales by E. T. A. Hoffman, Charles Perrault, Guy de Maupassant, Nicolai Gogol, and Edgar A. Poe.

Personaggi dublinesi che, nella loro inerzia e nella loro ipocrisia, riflettono caratteri universali. Racconti naturalistici che mettono a fuoco i momenti fondamentali dell'esistenza: la fanciullezza, l'adolescenza, la maturità.