Despite the long history of ironic imitation in the novel and statements that imitation is now the only mode available to the genre, the novel is still a viable literary form which is perhaps ready to move in new directions. According to John Barth and others, the literature of exhaustion is the direction the novel will take, and his The Sot-Weed Factor is a key example of deliberate ironic imitation of numerous literary models. Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey parodies the romantic gothic novel, Albert Camus's The Fall is an ironic confession, Barth's Sot-Weed Factor recreates the eighteenth-century mock-epic, and John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman is an imitation Victorian novel. Authorial presence and the fact of the fiction are combined with references to prior works, and protagonists are inversions of hero figures. Barth's novel draws most heavily from the epic, with the Odyssey and its successors providing epic characters, events, and devices presented in comically inverted forms. / The main plots of the four novels include mythic elements and follow the cycle of the hero who gets a call to depart from his home, journeys to an unknown world, and encounters impediments along the way. Austen's plot includes the complete cycle and the heroine returns home. Camus's and Barth's failed heroes choose to truncate the cycle and remain at the nadir. Fowles's protagonist is ready to move upward at the end of the novel but cannot return to his former world. Historical documents also provide sources of manipulation for Fowles's and Barth's characters and accurate evocations of earlier centuries. Barth takes audacious liberties with history, using real people and colonial records in a bewildering welter of fact, fancy, and fiction in a comic reinvention of the past. Within anachronistic settings, Barth and Fowles deal, as do Austen and Camus, with contemporary issues and philosophical views. Such relevance suggests continued viability of the novel despite the post-realist, post-modernist dilemma which the literature of exhaustion neither confronts nor solves. / While literature cannot be as abstract as other arts, it can be mimetic of an imagined construct, as in future fiction. Temporal distancing imparts freshness to such works regardless of narrative techniques. In Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, for example, epic, mythic, realist, and modernist devices are used in a rational consideration of contemporary concerns extrapolated into a possible future. Such fiction can be derivative in form but forward-looking in ideas and be an affirmation of the human spirit and imagination. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 41-11, Section: A, page: 4705. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1980.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74348 |
| Contributors | HABERHERN, MARGOT ANNE., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 274 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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