Fiction is the classification for any story or similar work derived from imagination—in other words, not based strictly on history or fact. Fiction can be expressed in a variety of formats, including writings, live performances, films, television programs, animations,video games, and role-playing games, though the term originally and most commonly refers to the narrative forms of literature (see literary fiction), including the novel, novella, short story, and play. Fiction does not refer to a specific mode or genre, unless used in its narrowest sense to mean a "literary narrative". Fiction is traditionally regarded as the opposite of non-fiction, whose creators assume responsibility for presenting only the historical and factual truth; however, the distinction between fiction and non-fiction can be blurred, for example, in postmodern literature.
A work of fiction is an act of creative invention; its total faithfulness to reality is not typically assumed by its audience, and so it is not expected to present only characters who are actual people or descriptions that are factually accurate. Instead, the context of fiction is generally open to interpretation, due to fiction's freedom from adhering exactly to the real world.</ref>[note 1] Characters and events within a fictional work may even be openly set in their own context entirely separate from the known universe: a fictional universe.
>> Literary Fiction
Literary fiction is defined as fictional works that are deemed to be of literary merit, as distinguished from most commercial, or "genre" fiction. The distinction can be controversialamong critics and scholars.
Literary fiction often involves social commentary, political criticism, or reflection on the human condition. In general it focuses on "introspective, in-depth character studies" of "interesting, complex and developed" characters. This contrasts with genre fiction where plot is the central concern. Usually in literary fiction the focus is on the "inner story" of the characters who drive the plot, with detailed motivations to elicit "emotional involvement" in the reader.
- The style of literary fiction is often described as "elegantly written, lyrical, and ... layered".
- The tone of literary fiction can be darker than genre fiction, while the pacing of literary fiction may be slower than popular fiction.
As Terrence Rafferty notes, "literary fiction, by its nature, allows itself to dawdle, to linger on stray beauties even at the risk of losing its way".
W. H. AUDEN
W.H. Auden was a British poet, author and playwright best known as a leading literary figure in the 20th century for his poetry.
QUOTES
“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: All of them make me laugh.”
—W.H. Auden
>> Synopsis
W.H. Auden, also known as Wystan Hugh Auden, was a poet, author and playwright born in York, England, on February 21, 1907. Auden was a leading literary influencer in the 20th century. Known for his chameleon-like ability to write poems in almost every verse form, Auden's travels in countries torn by political strife influenced his early works. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948.
Early Life
W.H. Auden was born Wystan Hugh Auden in York, England, on February 21, 1907. Raised by a physician father and a strict, Anglican mother, Auden pursued science and engineering at Oxford University before finding his calling to write and switching his major to English.
Auden pursued his love of poetry, influenced by Old English verse and the poems of Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, William Blake and Emily Dickinson. He graduated from Oxford in 1928, and that same year, his collectionPoems was privately printed.
>> Career Success
In 1930, with the help of T.S. Eliot, Auden published another collection of the same name (Poems) that featured different content. The success of this collection positioned him as one of the leading influencers in literature in the 20th century.
Auden's poems in the latter half of the 1930s reflected his journeys to politically torn countries. He wrote his acclaimed anthology, Spain, based on his first-hand accounts of the country's civil war from 1936 to 1939.
More so, Auden was lauded for his chameleon-like ability to write poems in almost every verse form. His work influenced aspiring poets, popular culture and vernacular speech. He stated in Squares and Oblongs: Essays Based on the Modern Poetry Collection at the Lockwood Memorial Library (1948), "A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language."
*Poems by W. H. Auden :
Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone
W. H. Auden
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
PERSONA
A persona is a character or figurative mask that an actor, writer, or singer takes on in order to perform. Originally a technique just for theater, the concept was popularized in literature by the poets Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Both men had a few named personae through whom they wrote famous poems. When a writer uses a persona through which to create a work of literature, it is understood that the resulting work takes on the traits of the poet him or herself and the different lens that the persona brings to the work.
The word persona was originally Latin, though there is some disagreement about the etymology of the word. The word originally referred to a real mask worn in theater. It probably either came from the Etruscan word phersu for the same concept, or from the Latin term per-sonare, which meant “sounding through.” In either case, there is a strong connection between the concept of persona and using a different character through which to experience the world.
>> Persona Example
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.”
(“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot)
> J. Alfred Prufrock is one of T. S. Eliot’s most famous personae. In this persona example, Eliot creates a dramatic interior monologue of a man who feels isolated and thwarted. While many critics at the time found it insignificant and the epiphanies therein trivial, others found the concept to be thoroughly modern. The technique of writing through a persona had been out of fashion since the Medieval ages, when it had been abandoned. Writing in the early 1900s, Eliot saw the immense possibilities available in writing through a persona. He used persona to distance himself from aspects of modern life that he disliked.
Shades of Callimachus, Coan ghosts of Philetas
It is in your grove I would walk,
I who come first from the clear font
Bringing the Grecian orgies into Italy,
and the dance into Italy.
Who hath taught you so subtle a measure,
in what hall have you heard it;
What foot beat out your time-bar,
what water has mellowed your whistles?
(“Homage to Sextus Propertius” by Ezra Pound)
> Ezra Pound was a mentor figure to T. S. Eliot, and was the editor for “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” He, too, wanted to explore certain themes through the possibility of a lens of another character’s experiences, and so adopted some examples of persona for his works of literature. Most of the personas he used were real-life poets, such as Sextus Propertius, a Latin elegiac poet who lived during the 1st century BC. Ezra Pound used the persona of Sextus Propertius to use Propertius’s style in homage to the poet.
>> Ex 3
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane
I was the smudge of ashen fluff–and I
I was the smudge of ashen fluff–and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky,
And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
10 Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!
(“Canto I” from Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov)
> Vladimir Nabokov’s brilliant novel Pale Fire is about the author of a 999-line poem, John Shade. The novel itself is presented as a forward to the poem by Shade’s neighbor Charles Kinbote, and includes the poem itself. This is a meta-textual example of persona in which Nabokov has of course written every part of the novel, yet presents himself as different characters. The above excerpt is the beginning of the 999-line poem, which Nabokov wrote as though he were the character John Shade. Much of the novel deals with truth and fiction, and Nabokov’s use of persona blurs the lines between these in a fascinating way.
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