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Don Quixote and his sidekick Sancho Panza, as illustrated by Gustave Doré: the characters' contrasting qualities [1] are reflected here even in their physical appearances. In any narrative, a foil is a character who contrasts with another character, typically, a character who contrasts with the protagonist, in order to better highlight or differentiate certain qualities of the protagonist.
Gawain and the loathly lady in W. H. Margetson's illustration for Maud Isabel Ebbutt's Hero-Myths and Legends of the British Race (1910) The loathly lady (Welsh: dynes gas, Motif D732 in Stith Thompson's motif index), is a tale type commonly used in medieval literature, most famously in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Wife of Bath's Tale. [1]
An example of this is The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning. In terms of narrative poetry, romance is a narrative poem that tells a story of chivalry. Examples include the Romance of the Rose or Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Although those examples use medieval and Arthurian materials, romances may also tell stories from classical mythology.
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 ).
From the moment a legend is retold as fiction, its authentic legendary qualities begin to fade and recede: in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving transformed a local Hudson River Valley legend into a literary anecdote with "Gothic" overtones, which actually tended to diminish its character as genuine legend. [28]
The leading ideas of the legends were presumably transferred individually, and appeared later in literary form in the most varied combinations. Not till the 6th century may the literary type of martyr be considered as perfected, and we are subsequently able to verify the literary associations of ideas.
A classic cinematic example of the theme is The Wolf Man (1941) which in later films joins with the Frankenstein Monster and Count Dracula as one of the three famous icons of modern day horror. However, werewolf fiction is an exceptionally diverse genre, with ancient folkloric roots and manifold modern re-interpretations.
The creation and study of the short story as a medium began to emerge as an academic discipline due to Blanche Colton Williams' "groundbreaking work on structure and analysis of the short story" [25]: 128 and her publication of A Handbook on Short Story Writing (1917), described as "the first practical aid to growing young writers that was put ...