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Epic – a very long narrative poem, often written about a hero or heroine and their exploits. Epic poem – a lengthy story of heroic exploits in the form of a poem. Essay - a short literary composition that reflects the author's outlook or point; Fable – a didactic story, often using animal characters who behave like people.
Name Definition Example Setting as a form of symbolism or allegory: The setting is both the time and geographic location within a narrative or within a work of fiction; sometimes, storytellers use the setting as a way to represent deeper ideas, reflect characters' emotions, or encourage the audience to make certain connections that add complexity to how the story may be interpreted.
In literary theoretic approach, narrative is being narrowly defined as fiction-writing mode in which the narrator is communicating directly to the reader. Until the late 19th century, literary criticism as an academic exercise dealt solely with poetry (including epic poems like the Iliad and Paradise Lost , and poetic drama like Shakespeare ).
In contemporary literary studies, a theme is a central topic, subject, or message within a narrative. [1] Themes can be divided into two categories: a work's thematic concept is what readers "think the work is about" and its thematic statement being "what the work says about the subject". [2]
Examples are the satiric mode, the ironic, the comic, the pastoral, and the didactic. [2] Frederick Crews uses the term to mean a type of essay and categorizes essays as falling into four types, corresponding to four basic functions of prose: narration, or telling; description, or picturing; exposition, or explaining; and argument, or ...
Examples of this kind of narrator include Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. in Timequake (in this case, the first-person narrator is also the author). In some cases, the narrator is writing a book—"the book in your hands"—and therefore he has most of the powers and knowledge of the author.
Obviously when you're writing a plot summary, you probably won't go into as much careful detail in thinking about every decision—for the most part, some aspects, such as picking what is important and what's not is intuitive, and doesn't require a lot of analysis. However, this example gives a sense of the logic that underlies a good summary.
The literary theory of Russian Formalism in the early 20th century divided a narrative into two elements: the fabula (фа́була) and the syuzhet (сюже́т). A fabula is the chronology of the fictional world, whereas a syuzhet is a perspective or plot thread of those events. Formalist followers eventually translated the fabula/syuzhet ...