Table Of ContentNarrative Beginnings
frontiers of narrative Series Editor: David Herman,
Ohio State University
*
Narrative Beginnings
Theories and Practices
Edited by Brian Richardson
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
LINCOLN AND LONDON
© 2008 by the Board of Regents of the
University of Nebraska. All rights reserved.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Narrative beginnings : theories and
practices / edited by Brian Richardson.
p. cm. — (Frontiers of narrative)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8032-3974-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Narration (Rhetoric) 2. English
literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc.
3. Literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc.
I. Richardson, Brian, 1953–
pr149.n27n38 2008
808—dc22 2008025271
Set in Sabon by Bob Reitz.
Designed by Ashley Muehlbauer.
This volume is dedicated to Hazard Adams,
R. Brandon Kershner, Peter Rabinowitz,
Monika Fludernik, and James Phelan:
teachers, mentors, and colleagues who
were there at many diff erent beginnings.
Contents
Editor’s Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction Narrative Beginnings 1
BRIAN RICHARDSON
Part One: Origins, Paratexts, and Prototypes 11
1. To Begin with the Beginning Birth, Origin, and Narrative
Inception 15
NIELS BUCH LEANDER
2. Before the Beginning Nabokov and the Rhetoric of the
Preface 29
MARILYN EDELSTEIN
3. Stories, Wars, and Emotions The Absoluteness of
Narrative Beginnings 44
PATRICK COLM HOGAN
4. September 1939 Beginnings, Historical Narrative, and the
Outbreak of World War II 63
PHILIPPE CARRARD
Part Two: Beginnings in Narrative Literature 79
5. “The More I Write, the More I Shall Have to Write”
The Many Beginnings of Tristram Shandy 83
TITA CHICO
6. Virginia Woolf and Beginning’s Ragged Edge 96
MELBA CUDDY-KEANE
7. A Theory of Narrative Beginnings and the Beginnings of
“The Dead” and Molloy 113
BRIAN RICHARDSON
8. Heartbreak Tango Manuel Puig’s Counter-Archive 127
CARLOS RIOBÓ
9. Lost Beginnings in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s
Children 137
GAURA SHANKAR NARAYAN
10. Recessive Origins in Julia Alvarez’s Garcia Girls
A Feminist Exploration of Narrative Beginnings 149
CATHERINE ROMAGNOLO
11. Curtain Up? Disrupted, Disguised, and Delayed Beginnings
in Theater and Drama 166
RYAN CLAYCOMB
12. Where to Begin? Multiple Narrative Paths in Web
Fiction 179
JESSICA LACCETTI
Part Three: Beginnings and/as Endings 191
13. The Beginning of Beloved A Rhetorical Approach 195
JAMES PHELAN
14. Connecting Links Beginnings and Endings 213
ARMINE KOTIN MORTIMER
15. “Mr. Betwixt-and-Between” The Politics of Narrative
Indeterminacy in Stevenson’s Kidnapped and David
Balfour 228
OLIVER BUCKTON
16. Maculate Reconceptions 246
SUSAN WINNETT
Further Reading on Narrative Beginnings 263
Contributors 267
Index 271
Editor’s Preface
Beginnings are one of the most important topics of narrative theory,
textual analysis, and the study of fi ction. They are frequently thema-
tized within modern literary narratives; to take a recent example, the
fi rst sentences of J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello run as follows,
“There is fi rst of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get
us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank. It is
a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together a bridge,”
an opening that gestures toward the problems and possibilities of
narrative openings. Beginnings are also among the most critically ne-
glected subjects: despite seminal books on the subject by Edward Said
and A. D. Nuttall, and despite the widely acknowledged importance
of beginnings, for the most part the critical literature on the subject
consists of these two books plus a few journal articles.
The essays in this volume attempt to rectify this situation by pro-
viding sixteen analyses of the most important authors, texts, and
approaches on the subject. They tend to focus on British, American,
and postcolonial literature from 1770 to 2006 but also include major
European and South American fi ction. The texts analyzed include
important works by Laurence Sterne, Balzac, R. L. Stevenson, James
Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel
Beckett, Manuel Puig, Salman Rushdie, Georges Perec, Toni Morrison,
and Julia Alvarez. Together, these essays trace the full arc of modern
literary history, going from the eighteenth century to nineteenth-century
realism and on to modernism, postmodernism, and hypertext fi ction.
All the essays are fully versed in relevant areas of narrative theory and
the theory of the novel, and each is comfortable addressing larger
cultural and ideological issues, including gender, race, and empire.
Indeed, these ideological issues are central concerns in the essays on
postcolonial, feminist, U.S. ethnic, and third-world authors. In ad-
dition to studies of beginnings in nineteenth-and twentieth-century
fi ction, the essays include interdisciplinary approaches that analyze
beginnings in historical narratives, hypertexts, plays and performance
art, and human cognition.
