Materials and Methods of Fiction - With an Introduction by Brander Matthews
127 pages
English

Materials and Methods of Fiction - With an Introduction by Brander Matthews

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127 pages
English
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Project Gutenberg's Materials and Methods of Fiction, by Clayton Hamilton This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Materials and Methods of Fiction With an Introduction by Brander Matthews Author: Clayton Hamilton Commentator: Brander Matthews Release Date: December 28, 2009 [EBook #30776] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MATERIALS AND METHODS OF FICTION *** Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Alison Hadwin and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net Transcriber's Note: Original spelling and punctuation were retained, with the following exceptions. On page 3, 'a mind native and indued to actuality' was corrected to 'a mind native and induced to actuality'; on page 15, 'but who have have been discarded' to 'but who have been discarded'; on page 21, 'The kindgom of adventure' to 'The kingdom of adventure'; on page 91, 'The Master of Ballantræ' to 'The Master of Ballantrae', as in all other instances of this word; and on page 227, the one instance of 'A Humble Rèmonstrance' was corrected to 'A Humble Remonstrance' to match the other instances.

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Publié par
Publié le 08 décembre 2010
Nombre de lectures 46
Langue English

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Project Gutenberg's Materials and Methods of Fiction, by Clayton Hamilton
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: Materials and Methods of Fiction
With an Introduction by Brander Matthews
Author: Clayton Hamilton
Commentator: Brander Matthews
Release Date: December 28, 2009 [EBook #30776]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MATERIALS AND METHODS OF FICTION ***
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Alison Hadwin and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Transcriber's Note: Original spelling and
punctuation were retained, with the following
exceptions. On page 3, 'a mind native and indued
to actuality' was corrected to 'a mind native and
induced to actuality'; on page 15, 'but who have
have been discarded' to 'but who have been
discarded'; on page 21, 'The kindgom of
adventure' to 'The kingdom of adventure'; on page
91, 'The Master of Ballantræ' to 'The Master of
Ballantrae', as in all other instances of this word;
and on page 227, the one instance of 'A Humble
Rèmonstrance' was corrected to 'A Humble
Remonstrance' to match the other instances.
MATERIALS AND
METHODS OF FICTION
BY
CLAYTON HAMILTONWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
BRANDER MATTHEWS
The Chautauqua Press
CHAUTAUQUA, NEW YORK
1911
Copyright, 1908, by
The Baker and Taylor Company
Published, May, 1908
TO
FREDERIC TABER COOPER
WITH ADMIRATION FOR THE CRITIC
WITH AFFECTION FOR THE FRIEND
[pg vii]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
Introduction ix
I The Purpose of Fiction 1
II Realism and Romance 23
II IThe Nature of Narrative 42
IV Plot 58
V Characters 75
VI Setting 97
VII The Point of View in Narrative 117
VIII Emphasis in Narrative 136
The Epic, the Drama, and the
IX 153
Novel
The Novel, the Novelette, and the
X 168X 168
Short-story
XI The Structure of the Short-story 184
XII The Factor of Style 201
Index 221
[pg ix]
INTRODUCTION
I
In our time, in these early years of the twentieth century, the novel is the
prosperous parvenu of literature, and only a few of those who acknowledge its
vogue and who laud its success take the trouble to recall its humble beginnings
and the miseries of its youth. But like other parvenus it is still a little uncertain of
its position in the society in which it moves. It is a newcomer in the literary
world; and it has the self-assertiveness and the touchiness natural to the
situation. It brags of its descent, although its origins are obscure. It has won its
way to the front and it has forced its admission into circles where it was formerly
denied access. It likes to forget that it was once but little better than an outcast,
unworthy of recognition from those in authority. Perhaps it is still uneasily
conscious that not a few of those who were born to good society may look at it
with cold suspicion as though it was still on sufferance.
Story-telling has always been popular, of course; and the desire is deep-rooted
in all of us to hear and to tell some new thing and to tell again something
deserving remembrance. But the novel itself, and the short-story also, must
confess that they have only of late been able to claim equality with the epic and
the lyric, and with comedy and tragedy, literary forms consecrated by antiquity.
[pg x] There were nine muses in Greece of old, and no one of these daughters of
Apollo was expected to inspire the writer of prose-fiction. Whoever had then a
story to tell, which he wished to treat artistically, never dreamed of expressing it
except in the nobler medium of verse, in the epic, in the idyl, in the drama.
Prose seemed to the Greeks, and even to the Latins who followed in their
footsteps, as fit only for pedestrian purposes. Even oratory and history were
almost rhythmic; and mere prose was too humble an instrument for those whom
the Muses cherished. The Alexandrian vignettes of the gentle Theocritus may
be regarded as anticipations of the modern short-story of urban local color; but
this delicate idyllist used verse for the talk of his Tanagra figurines.
Even when the modern languages entered into the inheritance of Latin and
Greek, verse held to its ancestral privileges, and the brief tale took the form of
the ballad, and the longer narrative called itself a chanson de geste. Boccaccio
and Rabelais and Cervantes might win immediate popularity and invite a host
of imitators; but it was long after their time before a tale in prose, whether short
or long, achieved recognition as worthy of serious critical consideration. In his
study of Balzac, Brunetière recorded the significant fact that no novelist, who
was purely and simply a novelist, was elected to the French Academy in the
first two centuries of its existence. And the same acute critic, in his "History of
Classical French Literature," pointed out that French novels were under a cloud
of suspicion even so far back as the days of Erasmus, in 1525. It was many
scores of years thereafter before the self-appointed guardians of French
literature esteemed the novel highly enough to condescend to discuss it.
[pg xi] Perhaps this was not altogether a disadvantage. French tragedy was discussedonly too abundantly; and the theorists laid down rules for it, which were not a
little cramping. Another French critic, M. Le Breton, in his account of the growth
of French prose-fiction in the first half of the nineteenth century, has asserted
that this exemption from criticism really redounded to the benefit of the novel,
since the despised form was allowed to develop naturally, spontaneously, free
from all the many artificial restrictions which the dogmatists succeeded in
imposing on tragedy and on comedy, and which resulted at last in the sterility of
the French drama toward the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning
of the nineteenth. While this advantage is undeniable, one may question
whether it was not bought at too great a price and whether there would not have
been a certain profit for prose-fiction if its practitioners had been kept up to the
mark by a criticism which educated the public to demand greater care in
structure, more logic in the conduct of events, and stricter veracity in the
treatment of characters.
However much it might then be deemed unworthy of serious consideration, the
novel in the eighteenth century began to attract to itself more and more authors
of rich natural endowment. In English literature especially, prose-fiction tempted
men as unlike as Defoe and Swift, Richardson and Fielding, Smollett and
Sterne, Goldsmith and Johnson. And a little earlier the eighteenth century
essayists, with Steele and Addison at the head of them, had developed the art
of character-delineation, a development out of which the novelists were to
make their profit. The influence of the English eighteenth-century essay on the
[pg xii] growth of prose-fiction, not only in the British Isles, but also on the continent of
Europe, is larger than is generally admitted. Indeed, there is a sense in which
the successive papers depicting the character and the deeds of Sir Roger de
Coverley may be accepted as the earliest of serial stories.
But it was only in the nineteenth century that the novel reached its full
expansion and succeeded in winning recognition as the heir of the epic and the
rival of the drama. This victory was the direct result of the overwhelming
success of the Waverley novels and of the countless stories written more or
less in accordance with Scott's formula, by Cooper, by Victor Hugo and Dumas,
by Manzoni, and by all the others who followed in their footsteps in every
modern language. Not only born story-tellers but writers who were by natural
gift poets or dramatists, seized upon the novel as a form in which they could
express themselves freely and by which they might hope to gain a proper
reward in money as well as in fame. The economic interpretation of literary
history has not received the attention it deserves; and the future investigator will
find a rich field in his researches for the causes of the expansion of the novel in
the nineteenth century simultaneous with the decline of the drama in the
literature of almost every modern language except French.
As the nineteenth century drew towards its maturity, the influence of Balzac
reinforced the influence of Scott; and realism began to assert its right to
substitute itself for romance. The adjustment of character to its appropriate
background, the closer connection of fiction with the actual facts of life, the
focusing of attention on the normal and the usual rather than on the abnormal
[pg xiii] and the exceptional,—all these steps in advance were more easily taken in the
freer form of the novel than they could be in the more restricted formula of the
drama; and for the first time in its history prose-fiction found itself a pioneer,
achieving a solidity of texture which the theater had not yet been able to attain.
The novel revealed itself at last as a fit instrument for applied psychology, for
the use o

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