Reading Contemporary British Fiction Consciously. Part 1

Министерство науки и высшего образования Российской Федерации

Федеральное государственное бюджетное образовательное учреждение

высшего образования 

«Оренбургский государственный университет»

Н.В. Лаштабова

READING CONTEMPORARY BRITISH 

FICTION CONSCIOUSLY

PART 1

Учебное пособие

Рекомендовано ученым советом федерального государственного бюджетного 
образовательного 
учреждения 
высшего 
образования 
«Оренбургский 

государственный университет» для обучающихся по образовательной программе 
высшего образования по направлению подготовки 45.03.01 Филология

Оренбург

2022

УДК 82.091
ББК  83.002.11
Л32

Рецензент – доктор филологических наук, профессор Садомская Н.Д.

Л32

Лаштабова Н.В.
Reading Contemporary British Fiction Consciously. Part 1 [Электронный
ресурс] : учебное пособие / Н.В. Лаштабова; Оренбургский гос. ун-т.–
Электрон. текстовые дан. (1 файл:896 Кб). – Оренбург: ОГУ, 2022. – 1 
электрон. опт. диск (CD-R): зв., цв.; 12 см. – Системные требования: 
Intel Core или аналогич.; Microsoft Windows 7, 8, 10; 512 Mб; монитор, 
поддерживающий режим 1024х768; мышь или аналогич. устройство. –
Загл. с этикетки диска.
ISBN 978-5-7410-2915-2

Учебное пособие Reading Contemporary British Fiction Consciously. 

Part 1 представляет собой комплекс теоретических и практических 
материалов по литературоведению и нарратологии, предназначенных 
для студентов, изучающих такие учебные дисциплины, как «История
мировой литературы», «Стилистика», «Практикум по интерпретации 
текста».

Учебное пособие состоит из 3 глав, содержащих разделы для 

изучения, снабженные вопросами и заданиями. Учебное пособие 
предназначено для аудиторной и самостоятельной работы обучающихся 
направления подготовки 45.03.01 Филология, профиля «Зарубежная 
филология».

УДК 82.091
ББК  83.002.11

ISBN 978-5-7410-2915-2

Лаштабова Н.В., 2022
 ОГУ, 2022

Содержание

Введение ...................................................................................................................5

1 Introduction to a Novel ...........................................................................................7

1.1 The Title............................................................................................................7

1.2 The Epigraph................................................................................................... 14

1.3 The Prologue................................................................................................... 20

1.4 The Framing Device........................................................................................ 23

1.5 The Opening ................................................................................................... 28

2 Aspects of Narrative.............................................................................................. 33

2.1 Narrating......................................................................................................... 33

2.2 First-Person Narration..................................................................................... 38

2.3 Recollection .................................................................................................... 41

2.4 The Inadequate Narrator.................................................................................. 43

2.5 A Man Writing as a Woman............................................................................ 46

2.6 Multiple Narrators........................................................................................... 49

2.7 Skaz ................................................................................................................ 52

2.8 The Self-Conscious Novel............................................................................... 54

2.9 Addressing the Reader .................................................................................... 57

2.10 The Omniscient Narrator............................................................................... 60

2.11 Point of View ................................................................................................ 63

2.12 Tense............................................................................................................. 67

2.13 Tense Shift .................................................................................................... 69

2.14 Free Indirect Style ......................................................................................... 72

3 Characters, Personages and Heroes ....................................................................... 75

3.1 People ............................................................................................................. 75

3.2 Characterization .............................................................................................. 80

3.3 Motivation....................................................................................................... 83

3.4 The Anti-Hero................................................................................................. 86

3.5 The Villain ...................................................................................................... 90

3.6 Real People ..................................................................................................... 94

3.7 The Alter Ego.................................................................................................. 98

Bibliography .......................................................................................................... 102

Введение

Изучение современных произведений художественной литературы дает 

возможность 
сформировать 
ценностное 
отношение 
к 
важнейшим 

социокультурным, философским, историческим и литературным аспектам 

жизни общества. Чтение и анализ художественной литературы способствует 

общеинтеллектуальному и духовному развитию личности. Данное учебное 

пособие обеспечивает изучение современной британской литературы в 

теоретическом аспекте и готовит к проведению научно-исследовательской 

деятельности, связанной с анализом и интерпретацией художественного текста, 

что по своему содержанию, целям и задачам соответствует федеральному 

государственному образовательному стандарту высшего образования по 

направлению подготовки 45.03.01 Филология. 

Использование учебного пособия в процессе подготовки студентов 

направлено 
на 
формирование 
ОПК-4, 
заключающейся 
в 
способности 

осуществлять на базовом уровне сбор и анализ языковых и литературных 

фактов, филологический анализ и интерпретацию текста.

В первой главе «Introduction to a Novel» («Введение в роман») изучаются

такие аспекты начала художественного произведения, как заглавие, эпиграф, 

пролог, завязка и обрамление. Рассматриваются примеры из произведений 

современной британской литературы, в которых указанные аспекты начала 

являются наиболее значимыми для литературоведческого анализа.

Во второй главе «Aspects of Narrative» («Аспекты нарратива») происходит 

осмысление 
таких 
элементов, 
как 
повествование 
от 
первого 
лица, 

воспоминание, рассказчик с особенностями мировосприятия, 
мужчина,

пишущий от лица женщины, множественные повествователи, 
всезнающий 

повествователь. Эти элементы позволяют посмотреть на произведение с 

разных сторон, понять, какую цель преследовал автор, используя их. 

Важнейший философский вопрос о взаимосвязи прошлого, настоящего и 

будущего рассмотрен при осмыслении хронологической последовательности

событий в тексте.
Изучение разговорного стиля речи на примерах
из 

современных художественных произведений дает понимание характеристик 

образов персонажей, их места и роли в обществе.

В третьей главе «Characters, Personages
and
Heroes» («Характеры, 

персонажи и герои») рассматривается, как могут быть изображены герои 

художественного произведения и какими
характеристиками они могут 

обладать. Особое место занимает исследование образа антигероя, злодея, 

образы реальных людей в литературе и средства создания образа альтер-эго.

Осмысленной работе с учебным пособием призваны помочь упражнения, 

которые предваряют и следуют после теоретического материала частей и 

разбора примеров из текстов. Библиографический список содержит данные о 

художественных произведениях, процитированных в пособии, и также 

теоретические работы, на которые опирался автор.

1 Introduction to a Novel

1.1 The Title

Pre-reading discussion

1. What is a title?

2. Can you remember the full titles and shortened ones of your favourite novels 

or short stories? 

3. What do the titles reflect if you see them on the cover at a bookstore? What 

titles are most attractive for you?

4. Why do people say “Don’t judge a book by its cover”? How is it connected 

with the title?

5. Read the part connected with the titles and their functions in fiction and 

divide them into categories, according to the function.

Even the most common and unremarkable kind of title, the bare name of the 

novel’s central character, will tell us something in advance about how to read. Jane 

Austen’s “Emma” is about a singular and powerful individual, freed by wealth, and 

the lack of parental guidance, to exercise her sometimes imperious will. It is no 

accident that this is the only Austen’s novel to take its heroine’s name as a title.  To 

think of it another way, imagine that Henry James’s “The Portrait of a Lady” were 

called Isabel Archer. This is no unimaginable, for Isabel is entirely the centre of the 

story, yet it would be to lose an important cue given us by James’s title. However 

central are Isabel’s experience, her consciousness, her choice of life, the title insists 

on a certain analytical distance.  We watch her make her mistakes; we see the 

disastrous effects of her self-delusions. To give the novel its protagonists’ name

would be to encourage a sympathy that James seems to warn us off.

Unsurprisingly, both novelists and their publishers care very much about titles, 

knowing that they are the means to get to the willing reader. Publishers have been 

known to put their novelists right in this matter. When Charles Monteith, editor at 

Faber and Faber, happened upon a novel by an unknown writer called William 

Golding that had been rejected by up to twenty other publishers, it was called 

“Strangers from Within”. Among other adjustments that Monteith suggested was the 

changing of the title to “Lord of the Flies”. One can hardly doubt that he was right. 

The phrase is used by the boys in the novel for the pig’s head stuck on a pole to 

propitiate the “beast” that supposedly haunts the island. It is a totem of savage fear. It 

is also the English version of a Hebrew name for the Devil, Belzebub. The title tells 

us, both more clearly and more subtly than Golding’s earlier suggestion, how all that 

is fearful on the island comes from within the boys themselves. 

What about the title that seems a guide to the reader? While it is common for a 

title to tell us who a novel is about (“David Copperfield” (1849-1850), “Mrs 

Dalloway” (1925) or where it is set (“Mansfield Park”, 1814), “Washington Square”, 

1880), it is more unusual and more pointed, for the title to declare the book’s theme. 

When he called his 1999 novel “Disgrace”, J.M. Coetzee joined other contemporary 

practicing novelists who have announced their works with one-word abstractions. In 

some years, there have been plenty. Salman Rushdie’s “Shame” (1983) and “Fury”

(2001), Peter Carey’s “Bliss” (1981), Anita Brookner’s “Providence” (1982), 

A.S. Byatt’s “Possession”, Ian McEwan’s “Atonement”. In each case the author 

appears to be pressing on the reader the significance, in the abstract, of the story that 

is to follow. These novels risk sounding as if they have theories in mind, each title 

being a nudge to the future undergraduate, a clue to the best focus of an essay. 

Perhaps such titles are particularly likely from novelists who themselves have had an 

academic training and have been taught to find the unifying ideas in narratives.

Novelists started using abstract-noun titles at the beginning of the nineteenth 

century for essentially didactic purposes. As well as those that came in pairs –

Elizabeth Inchbald’s “Nature and Art” (1796) or Jane Austen’s “Sense and 

Sensibility” (1811) – there were novels like Mary Brunton’s “Self-Control” (1811), 

Maria Edgeworth’s “Patronage” (1814), and Susan Ferrier’s “Marriage” (1818). The 

lessons of these were unswerving. Brunton’s heroine discovers the joys of “chastened 

affection” and “tempered desires”. Edgeworth’s novel displays in lengthy detail the 

evils of patronage. Ferrier diagrammatically contrasts the joys of a happy marriage 

with the pains of one undertaken foolishly. The one subtle early example is Austen’s 

“Persuasion” (1818, a title decided by her brother Henry after her death, but probably 

in accordance with her wishes). This novel explores what persuades people not to 

follow their inclinations, but does not exactly recommend or condemn “persuasion”. 

Later in the nineteenth century such titles became capacious rather that didactic: 

“War and Peace” (1863-1869) is the obvious example. The title of Dostoevsky’s 

“Crime and Punishment” (1866) sounds so straightforward – and does indeed sum up 

the inevitability of consequences in the novel – yet it deliberately fails to do justice to 

the psychological torments that fills its pages. With modernism, such abstract titles 

became open to sharply ironical use by writers like Joseph Conrad. His novel 

“Chance” (1914) shows how actions are determined by psychological necessity; 

“Victory” (1915) is about the salvation that may be found in defeat. When Conrad 

dies, he left a novel tantalizingly incomplete called “Suspense”. He also wrote a 

wonderful novella called “Youth” (1902), about not being young any more (which 

became the title of Coetze’s next novel after “Disgrace”).

The title of J.M. Coetze’s “Disgrace” is not exactly ironical, but it is 

forbidding. It insists on an uncomfortable topic. We are informed what the novel is 

about – characters, locations and events are described in detail. The title sensitizes a 

reader to a theme, even to a word. Phrases that could otherwise have been casual 

hook our attention. The whole thing is disgraceful from beginning to end, David 

Laurie’s ex-wife, Rosalind, says of his affair with his student. Disgraceful and vulgar 

too. Because of the book’s title, we notice her easy, indeed vulgar, use of 

“disgraceful”, an empty expression of exasperation. She means rather little by it. We 

know, after all, that she is a fellow “sensualist” and no believer in any moral 

requirement to curb desire. She is simply saying that people should not be so foolish

[36]. Yet we notice too how disgrace means so much more than she realizes. Her ex
husband is in the process of disgracing himself, dragging himself down. In the end,

this disgrace will evenpermit him a kind of humiliated self-recognition.

A complaint is made against him for his sexual pursuit of his young 

student Melanie Isaacs, and an official investigation begins. Lurie is given the

opportunity by his university to save his job by displaying a token penitence. 

Angered by the self-righteousness of those who sit in judgment on him and

thedishonesty required of him, he refuses. He will not “express contrition” [13; 

54] in some insincere public gesture of humility and shamefacedness. Yet he

comes to experience and accept a deeper feeling of disgrace. He is made to

feel old, futile, truly ashamed. The would-be “servant of Eros” [13; 52] is, after 

all, a mere sexual predator. He is driven to a strange “ceremony” of self-abasement

when he visits the family of the girl he has forced himself on; “he gets to his 

knees and touches his forehead to the floor” [13; 173]. He tries “to accept

disgrace as my state of being” [13; 172].
He loses
everything
as
a

punishment for the affair; disgrace is his feeling that this is what he deserves.

In “Disgrace” those who feel disgraced are also those who have been punished

or humiliated. Lucie’s daughter Lucy is gang-raped, but it is she who tastes 

disgrace, taught the lesson of her weakness and made to suffer for the sins of her 

white tribe. As if she deserved it. Lurie imagines the rapists driving away in

Lucy’s car, contented. “They must have had every reason to be pleased with their

afternoon’s work; they must have felt happy in their vocation” [13; 159]. He, the

father, has been locked in the lavatory while it happens. He cannot save his 

daughter. “Lucy’s secret; his disgrace” [13; 109]. He is stripped of all that once 

gave him power and authority. When he first moves out into the arid countryside

to live with Lucy, he works helping put down the unwanted dogs who plague 

the locality. He has become a “dog-man”. (Not since “King Lear” have there 

been so many referencesin a literary work to the analogies between humans and

dogs.)

He observes that the condemned dogs “flatten their ears” and droop

their tails”, “asif theytoofeel the disgrace of dying” [13; 143].

As if disgrace were the recognition of what is most terrible in life Coetzee’s

title contests, in advance of the critics any assumption that the novel is some kind

of allegory of the state o f South Africa. The singular abstraction suggests that

the book wants to bring to life a universal condition. Surprisingly, ratherlike those 

didactic titles of the early nineteenth century, it suggests not just a theme but a

lesson: disgrace is salutary, even necessary. 

The other common type of title that presents itself as an authorial hint at a 

novel's implicit subject matter is the quotation title. This signals a relationship

with another book, another author. The habit of using quotations for novel titles

seems itself to have been Victorian in origin. One of the earliest examples is the

best-seller “Not Wisely But Too Well” (1867) by Rhoda Broughton (the 

quotation, from “Othello”, applies to a heroine whose virtue triumphs over her

amorous inclinations). The earliest famous example is probably Hardy”s “Under the 

Green-woodTree”(1872),an untypically cheerfulstory of Wessex life. The title refers

the reader to a pastoral song in Shakespeare’s“As You Like It” [46; v], sung by an

exiled courtier in the Forest of Arden.

Under the greenwood tree

Who loves to lie with me,

And turn his merry note

Unto the sweet bird's throat,

Come hither, come hither, come hither!

Here shall he see No enemy

But winter and rough weather.

The immediate suggestion of the title is that the novel’s bucolicdelights are 

timeless; we have encountered them before. When he came to naming “Far from 

the Madding Crowd” (1874), however, Hardy used quotation ironically. The

phrase is taken from Thomas Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”. 

Those who recall the original context – and in Hardy’s day the “Elegy” was still 

one of the best known and best loved poems in the language – would have their 

appreciation of the novel slightly changed. In his poem, Gray speaks of rural life 

“Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife”. If you know this, Hardy’s subtly 

amended use of the quotation is striking: the countryside he depicts is full of strife. 

The novel depicts the economic precariousness of rural life, as well as the destructive 

passions of several of its main characters. Its title is an anti-pastoral irony.