Openings : narrative beginnings from the epic to the novel
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Openings : narrative beginnings from the epic to the novel
Clarendon Press , Oxford University Press, 1992
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Note
Includes biblographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
What is the difference between a natural beginning and the beginning of a story? Some deny that there are any beginnings in nature, except perhaps for the origin of the universe itself, suggesting that elsewhere we have only a continuum of events, into which beginnings are variously `read' by different societies. This book argues that history is full of real beginnings but that poets and novelists are indeed free to begin their stories wherever they like. The
ancient poet Homer laid down a rule for his successors when he began his epic by plunging in medias res, `into the midst of things'. Later writers, however, persistently play off the `interventionist', in medias res opening against some sense of a `deep', natural beginning: Genesis or the birth of a
child. The author also outlines how the inspiring Muse of epic gives way to the poet's ego, dies, revives and dies again.
Ranging from Greek and Roman epic to the modern novel via Dante, Milton, Wordsworth, Sterne and Dickens, A. D. Nuttall has written an ambitious and original book which will be of interest to a wide variety of readers.
Table of Contents
- Part 1 The beginning of the "Aeneid": the voice of the Muse and the voice of the poet
- polysemous epic
- the beginning of the story. Part 2 The "Commedia": intervention - poetic and divine
- Dante and Virgil
- Chaucer and the "overheard opening". Part 3 "Paradise Lost": Renaissance ego and the rebirth of the Muse
- Genesis and the beginning of "Paradise Lost". Part 4 "The Prelude": the retroactive poem
- the Muse and the dead self. Part 5 "Tristram Shandy": telling versus explaining
- comedy as bodily critique. Part 6 David and Pip: the discarded face
- modes of self-reference. Part 7 The sense of a beginning: the idea of a natural beginning
- finding the Muse.
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