What is it about?
This book explains the parameters and effects of Free Indirect Style in relation to characters' minds in fiction and the authors and narrators who tell the stories. It analyses narratives by three Modernist authors, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce, examining how each of these authors experiments with FIS in unique ways in order to conceptualise how their characters' minds are working and to manipulate the involvement of narratorial voice.
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Why is it important?
Free Indirect Style is one of the most important, interesting and perplexing linguistic techniques in literary fiction. It allows authors to refract their narratives through the points of view of their characters and to access and express third-person subjectivities. It gives readers a view into characters' minds - not just the language area but all the different types of 'mind-stuff' that makes up human consciousness. With FIS authors can represent non-verbal thoughts, feelings and perceptions with language, and thereby show them to the reader.
Perspectives
Everyone who reads fiction is aware of the insights it gives into human experience - it allows us to go inside the minds of other people for temporary periods of time and to get an idea of what it's like to be somebody else, to witness someone else's mind. My hope for this book is that it will provide readers with new theoretical and linguistic resources to mine these insights of literary fiction, to explore the nature of human consciousness by analysing how it is conceptualized by authors and readers through language.
Eric Rundquist
Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Free Indirect Style in Modernism, November 2017, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/lal.29.
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