This study demonstrates the importance of character development and writing style in eight science fiction novels: Ursula K. LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and The Beginning Place, and Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection, Nova, and Dhalgren. It uses as an embarkation point a chapter length review of critical studies of character development in fiction, beginning with the paradigmatic theoretical rift between Henry James and H. G. Wells. Then the second chapter examines the methodology of close critical analysis of individual passages. The remaining nine chapters cover the eight novels separately, with one chapter left to summarize the study's conclusions. / The dissertation concludes that science fiction has, within the past twenty years, begun producing novels in which the development of character and the prominence of the struggling individual as established in fiction by such writers as Henry James, Anton Chekhov and James Joyce, play a far more important role than has been the case traditionally. Traditional science fiction, as discussed by critics like Donald Wollheim, downplays character development and attention to linguistic sophistication. Generally, this study finds that, while several of these novels have weaknesses in character development or language, particularly The Beginning Place, Babel-17, and Nova, all are "well wrought" novels which deserve the close attention of readers and critics to both the stylistic technique and the human characters. Throughout the study, numerous examples of linguistic technique--word choice, sentence structure and length, dialogue, descriptive technique--are included for close and lengthy examination, in order to establish the usefulness of the author's style to the achievement of the novel's apparent purpose, its revelation of character and its achievement of meaning. This close examination of examples is the principal tool employed by this study in order to substantiate the claims made about language and character development in these novels. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 45-10, Section: A, page: 3131. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1984.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_75432 |
| Contributors | LITTLEFIELD, RALPH EMERSON., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 461 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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