Overview

Frank Norris: Spatial Form and Narrative Time offers a unique and illuminating examination of American naturalist Frank Norris. Norris's theories,evident in both his fiction and his critical writings, reflect his keen awareness of the relationship of time and space within literature. This work identifies spatial elements within Norris's fiction and determines how Norris, deeply influenced by both his early training as an artist and by Impressionism, employs these elements as primary structural devices to counter the linearity of his narrative. Employing mainstream critical theory, Frank Norris: Spatial Form and Narrative Time establishesr for the first time how Norris's use of spatial form, particularly his use of Impressionism, looks toward modernism and contributes to spatial form in literature in general.

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9780820419404

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Reviews

'Frank Norris: Spatial Form and Narrative Time' is a sophisticated analysis of the aesthetic consequences of Norris's early, serious training as a painter. In clear and compelling prose, Dr. Boyd goes beyond the half-dozen extant critiques of Norris as art student to lay out the temporal as well as spatial dimensions of his major fiction and literary theory. Her analyses of Norris's major fictions is deeply imbedded in Norris's Paris experiences as well as in the scholarship and criticism of Donald Pizer and Don Graham, both of whom Boyd challenges seriously. Boyd's study puts the question of the role of romance and art in America at the beginning of the twentieth century on a higher plane than it has previously occupied, with original and intelligent speculation and analysis. (Norman S. Grabo, The University of Tulsa)

Author Information

The Author: Jennifer Boyd graduated from the University of Iowa and received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Tulsa. She has taught at the University of Tulsa and Portland State University and is a former fiction editor of Nimrod. She currently teaches English at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, and lives in Portland with her husband, Clark, and daughter, Vanessa.

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