Framing fiction : initial framings in the American novel from 1790 to 1900 / eingereicht von Christian Quendler

• VerfasserIn: Quendler, Christian
• Place / Publishing House: 2006
• Year of Publication: 2006
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 298 Bl.; Ill.; Zsfassung

ger: The border or threshold between literary fiction and its non-literary surrounding serves as an ideal interface for studying the reciprocity of fiction and culture. This PhD thesis puts this assumption to a test by studying the beginnings of the American novel and its further development in the nineteenth century from a highly specific angle that explores what is at stake in the interfacial initial structures of novels.<br />Starting with the premise that the beginning of a work contains important cues that illuminate on the specific quality of the fictional space and its relation to the non-fictional surroundings, this PhD thesis contributes to a historical pragmatics of fiction by analyzing historical changes in the way novels are framed. It explores the heuristic value of frame theory for a history of the functions of the American novel from the late eighteenth century to early Modernism by examining framings that occur on both sides of the threshold of fiction:<br />on the one hand, paratextual framings (such as title pages, epigraphs, dedications, advertisements, prefaces, and introductions) including iconic and material aspects of a book (such as cover illustrations and frontispieces, type faces, or the format and binding of a novel) are studied; on the other hand, this PhD thesis is concerned with intratextual framings that appear at the beginning of the main text such as frame narratives, metafictional comments or the creation of a fictional speech situation.<br />The main hypothesis that guided the research for this dissertation is that a diachronic view of framing configurations and changes in framing practices produce a historical narrative of how the American novel writes itself into the world. A historical analysis of initial framings can help to identify and illustrate general tendencies in the development of a culture. Explicating premises signaled in framings that occur in the paratexts of a novel and at the beginning of the main text brings out in more detail the historically specific social functions of the novel. Further, analyzing framing conventions of novels contributes to a historical aesthetics of the novelistic fiction of a certain period or aesthetic movement. In particular, the frame analysis considers three interrelated aspects of literary exchange: the negotiation of public and fictional speech at the threshold of fiction, the media configuration of novels as printed fictional discourse, and the ways the medium is deployed in the narrative performance of the fiction. The overall historical discussion of framing conventions follows the established periodization and historical labels of nineteenth-century American literary history: the Early Republic (1890-1836), the American Renaissance (1837-1864), and the Gilded Age (1865-1900). The individual historical chapters are organized in a way that roughly follows what may be described as the default make-up of novelistic framings: the embedding of the fictional narrative in the social act of cultural communication and the transmission and presentation of the narrative content itself. In other words they follow a structure, which in the introductory chapter on frame theory is proposed as the basic dimensions of the novelistic frame. They constitute structural moments of novelistic exchanges, which are signaled and communicated through framings on the textual surface. In the final section of each historical chapter an attempt is made to read across various types of verbal and non-verbal framing devices in order to synthesize what can be described as the characteristic framing gestures of a historical period or an aesthetic tradition of novel writing. In the first historical chapter on the Early Republic the intricacies of editorial and epistolary framings are explored in the cultural context of the Early Republic. Epistolary framing gestures are analyzed as literary responses to issues of gender, national identity, and social control. While in the Early American fiction epistolary framings reveal a marked desire to control imaginary perception as a potentially subversive, experiments with paratextual framing in novels of the American Renaissance welcomed such subversive transgression by turning aspects of communication and mediation into subjects of imaginary perception. The rise of oratorical framing gestures are such an experimental case in point, which reveal both the romantic interest in the oral origins of literature and the impact of the emerging print mass media. As a characteristic framing strategy of the realist novel, the last historical chapter on the Gilded Age deals with the realist ambition to frame subjective experience. The final chapter provides an extensive summary that reviews the value of a historical frame analysis for studying the novel as social artifact and a cultural practice of aesthetic communication. It concludes with an outlook of framing strategies in modernism.<br />

eng: The border or threshold between literary fiction and its non-literary surrounding serves as an ideal interface for studying the reciprocity of fiction and culture. This PhD thesis puts this assumption to a test by studying the beginnings of the American novel and its further development in the nineteenth century from a highly specific angle that explores what is at stake in the interfacial initial structures of novels.<br />Starting with the premise that the beginning of a work contains important cues that illuminate on the specific quality of the fictional space and its relation to the non-fictional surroundings, this PhD thesis contributes to a historical pragmatics of fiction by analyzing historical changes in the way novels are framed. It explores the heuristic value of frame theory for a history of the functions of the American novel from the late eighteenth century to early Modernism by examining framings that occur on both sides of the threshold of fiction:<br />on the one hand, paratextual framings (such as title pages, epigraphs, dedications, advertisements, prefaces, and introductions) including iconic and material aspects of a book (such as cover illustrations and frontispieces, type faces, or the format and binding of a novel) are studied; on the other hand, this PhD thesis is concerned with intratextual framings that appear at the beginning of the main text such as frame narratives, metafictional comments or the creation of a fictional speech situation.<br />The main hypothesis that guided the research for this dissertation is that a diachronic view of framing configurations and changes in framing practices produce a historical narrative of how the American novel writes itself into the world. A historical analysis of initial framings can help to identify and illustrate general tendencies in the development of a culture. Explicating premises signaled in framings that occur in the paratexts of a novel