Foregrounded Description in Prose Fiction : : Five Cross-Literary Studies / / José Lopes.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Toronto Press eBook-Package Archive 1933-1999
• VerfasserIn: Lopes, José,
• MitwirkendeR: Krysinski, Wladimir,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2016]; ©1995
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Series: Theory / Culture
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (196 p.)

In this wide-ranging study, José Manuel Lopes proposes a theoretical framework for analysing the role of description in prose fiction. He offers readings of texts drawn from four national literatures—French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilian—testing his model across a cultural and temporal spectrum. This critical breadth also illustrates the significance of description in disparate contexts: the postmodern novel, which implicitly challenges conventional notions of foreground and background, as well as the naturalist and realist fiction of the nineteenth century.Lopes applies his model to detailed readings of Emile Zola's Une Page d'amour, Claude Simon's Histoire, Benito Pérez Galdós' La de Bringas, Cornélio Penna's A Menina Morta, and Carlos de Oliveira's Finisterra. In addition to exploring the interplay of description and narration, these readings pay particular attention to spatial descriptions, and analyse the diverse roles of description in different contexts. After subjecting each fictional text to a detailed analysis which seeks to bring out the crucial aspects that contribute towards the foregrounding of descriptive passages (e.g., mise en abyme, parody, modes of representation), and which establishes, on occasion, certain relations that literary description may entertain with the other arts, he attempts to isolate the primary functions of foregrounding descriptions. What he seeks to demonstrate is that description constitutes a major textual component necessary for the analysis and understanding of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century fictional texts.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- I. Towards a framework for the analysis of description in prose fiction -- II. Description and mise en abyme in Zola's line Page d'amour -- III. Reading of visual images and postcard descriptions in Claude Simon's Histoire -- IV. The sarcastic descriptor: Satire and parody in Benito Perez Galdos' La de Bringas -- V. Description and modes of representation in Cornelio Penna's A Menina Morta -- VI. The impossible 'mimesis': Description and metadescription in Carlos de Oliveira's Finisterra -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index