Abstract
The essay demonstrates the relationship between specific figures of discourse dominant in particular novels and the thematic concerns or plot patterns of each individual novel. The figures discussed are (1) enthymeme, prominent in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and important also in Joyce’s Ulysses; (2) hypallage, part of the rhetoric of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, reflecting its plot pattern and its cluster of concerns; and (3) blazon, which helps to convey the implied author’s critique of the attitudes of the first-person narrator of Lolita.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Figures of discourse in prose fiction
- Joseph Conrad’s reluctant raconteurs
- Audience-authored paratexts: legitimation of online discourse about Game of Thrones
- Horizontal metalepsis in narrative fiction
- “Small machines of words”: poetics, phonetics, and mechanisms of narrative realism in late twentieth-century Hip Hop
- Secondary storyworld possible selves: narrative response and cultural (un)predictability
- Explaining the innovation dichotomy: the contexts, contents, conflicts, and compromises of innovation stories