Fabulation
Genre of primarily 20th-century novelistic fiction similar in style to magic realism
In literary criticism, the term fabulation was popularized by Robert Scholes, in his work The Fabulators, to describe the large and growing class of mostly 20th-century novels that are in a style similar to magic realism, and do not fit into the traditional categories of realism or (novelistic) romance. As M. H. Abrams wrote,
[Such novels] violate, in various ways, standard novelistic expectations by drastic—and sometimes highly effective—experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal sequence, and fusions of the everyday, the fantastic, the mythical, and the nightmarish, in renderings that blur traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic.[1]
Fabulating authors include Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, William H. Gass, Robert Coover, and Ishmael Reed.[1]
References
- ^ a b Abrams, M. H. (2005). A Glossary of Literary Terms. With contributions by Geoffrey Galt Harpham (8th ed.). Boston, MA: Thomson/Wadsworth. p. 204. ISBN 1-4130-0218-8. Retrieved 7 February 2023.
Further reading
- Scholes, Robert (1967). The Fabulators. New York: Oxford University Press. LCCN 67025465. Also expanded upon in Scholes, Robert (1979). Fabulation and Metafiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-00704-2.
- Mellard, James M. (1980). The Exploded Form: The Modernist Novel in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-00801-4.
- Bordeleau, Érik; Pape, Toni; Rose-Antoinette, Ronald; Szymanski, Adam (2017). Nocturnal Fabulations: Ecology, Vitality and Opacity in the Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (PDF). London: Open Humanities Press. ISBN 978-1-78542-040-5.
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