Critical responses to John Irving's fiction have generally adhered to the well-rehearsed notion that there is an unbridgeable divide between certain literary forms and traditions. The oppositional thinking that has tended to dominate twentieth-century literary criticism has consequently produced a distorted and rigidly binaristic view of Irving, as either realist or postmodemist, populist or experimentalist. This thesis sets out to establish a more complex language or framework for discussing Irving's work, which, rather than erasing or ignoring those features that appear anomalous when placed within the narrow parameters of a single literary tradition, is more able to accommodate and analyze the tensions and contradictions that arise through the juxtaposition and interaction of multiple literary codes. In particular, this approach is designed to facilitate a more complex and fluid exploration of the deployment of metafictional strategies in Irving's novels, as I argue that his work demonstrates the acute interest in the issue of fictionality that is characteristic of metafictional writing, without either rupturing the reader/writer contract or rejecting the referential function of literary fiction. Irving's work thus both explores and reasserts the capacity of narrative fiction to convey different kinds of truth.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:396457 |
| Date | January 2001 |
| Creators | Johnson, Lucas Stacey |
| Publisher | University of Birmingham |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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