Stephen Benson, Cycles of Influence : Fiction, Folktale, Theory, Wayne State University Press, 2003, 316 p.
ISBN 0-8143-2949-7
Description de léditeur:
In this wide-ranging and insightful analysis, Stephen Benson proposes a poetics of narrative for postmodernism by placing new emphasis on the folktale. Postmodernist fictions have evidenced a return to narrativeto storytelling centered on a sequence of events, rather than a "spiraling" of events as found in modernismand recent theorists have described narrative as a "central instance of the human mind." By characterizing the folktale as a prime embodiment of narrative, Benson relates folktales to many of the theoretical concerns of postmodernism and provides new insights into the works of major writers who have used this genre, which includes the subgenre of the fairy tale, in opening narrative up to new possibilities.
The arguments presented will interest not only folklorists and scholars of narrative but also readers in fields ranging from comparative literature to feminist theory.