In What Ways Does John Fowles Play with Textual Form and Feature in Order to Transform Ideas, Experience and Acts of Reading?
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- Category: English: Novels
- Date Submitted: 02/03/2015 04:42 AM
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In what ways does John Fowles play with textual form and feature in order to transform ideas, experience and acts of reading? Discuss with close textual analysis to support your response.
“The French Lieutenant’s Woman is both a formal imitation of the Victorian novel and an elegant endeavour at assessing the historical and mental difference between such a story and a modern reader.” John Fowle’s 1969 novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman , experiments with textual techniques and strategies to produce a postmodern pastiche of the Victorian romantic novel. Emerging in the 1960s, postmodernism is both the continuation and development of modernism. The literature of this period represented a break from nineteenth century realism as modernist literature had, yet emphasized manipulation of existing forms and styles. Fowles interweaves the historical backdrop of Victorian society, the intrusive narrative voice and the uncertainty of multiple endings to break the fictive illusion which brings the novel from objectivity of modernism into the subjectivity of postmodernism to transform the ideas and experience of the reader.
Fowles sets his novel in context of conservative Victorian society, and his use of intertexuality and his focus on certain aspects of Victorianism, namely the idea of the “fallen woman”, create a postmodern parody. Intertexuality and allusion in The French Lieutenant’s Woman is an important element in its recognition as a postmodern text, and Fowles uses this narrative technique to provide further commentary to his novel. He begins each of his chapters with an epigraph, an excerpt taken from notable Victorian literature, reports or medical documents. This technique reinforces the idea that it is set in Victorian England, and also foreshadows the events in the chapter. For example, the epigraph to Chapter 12 is from Tennyon’s poem “In Memoriam”, “ And was the day of my delight/ As pure and perfect as I say?” This rhetorical question in this epigraph...
“The French Lieutenant’s Woman is both a formal imitation of the Victorian novel and an elegant endeavour at assessing the historical and mental difference between such a story and a modern reader.” John Fowle’s 1969 novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman , experiments with textual techniques and strategies to produce a postmodern pastiche of the Victorian romantic novel. Emerging in the 1960s, postmodernism is both the continuation and development of modernism. The literature of this period represented a break from nineteenth century realism as modernist literature had, yet emphasized manipulation of existing forms and styles. Fowles interweaves the historical backdrop of Victorian society, the intrusive narrative voice and the uncertainty of multiple endings to break the fictive illusion which brings the novel from objectivity of modernism into the subjectivity of postmodernism to transform the ideas and experience of the reader.
Fowles sets his novel in context of conservative Victorian society, and his use of intertexuality and his focus on certain aspects of Victorianism, namely the idea of the “fallen woman”, create a postmodern parody. Intertexuality and allusion in The French Lieutenant’s Woman is an important element in its recognition as a postmodern text, and Fowles uses this narrative technique to provide further commentary to his novel. He begins each of his chapters with an epigraph, an excerpt taken from notable Victorian literature, reports or medical documents. This technique reinforces the idea that it is set in Victorian England, and also foreshadows the events in the chapter. For example, the epigraph to Chapter 12 is from Tennyon’s poem “In Memoriam”, “ And was the day of my delight/ As pure and perfect as I say?” This rhetorical question in this epigraph...