This essay is not far short of 11,000 words, so I’ve posted the opening section here as a taster, followed by a pdf for download. ‘Story time’ is not the same thing as ‘narrative time’. The Russian Formalists, active during the early years of the twentieth century, used the terms ‘fabula’ and ‘sjuzhet’ to refer…
Tag: The Ballad of Peckham Rye
‘Outside,’ said the barmaid: repetition as a temporal location marker
If a word, phrase, or passage is repeated in a literary text, the reader’s natural response will be to assume that that which is repeated must be significant in some way. The very fact that a particular cluster of words has been included in the text more than once invites the reader to assign a…
The Murder of Merle Coverdale
Many of Muriel Spark’s readers have accused her of being ‘cold’ in the treatment of her characters and in the case of Merle Coverdale in The Ballad of Peckham Rye, first published in 1960, Spark’s position of callous indifference would appear to have been taken to an extreme: Merle is not only heartlessly disposed…
Three Spark Novels Covered
We all know we’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, and we all do it nevertheless. Of course we do. So much so, in fact, that the cover design is now recognised as part of the narratology of a book: the ‘layout and illustration of a book’s cover and the design of…
Marinated and battered administrator with chips and mushy peas
I’ve been reading Peter Stockwell’s Cognitive Poetics, and one of the suggested exercises was to write your life story as a cookery recipe, which sounded like fun, so I’ve given it a go. One thing I noticed straight away as soon as I started to write was just how many very violent verbs there are…
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