Tag: classic fiction (Page 1 of 2)

Unlocking Setting, Symbol, and Scope: Reading Fiction Step 7

October 25, 2025 / MJ Booklover / 0 Comments

Many famous scenes in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises are set at a bullfight ring. It is hard to imagine Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice proposing to Lizzie Bennett in these surroundings! Setting helps determine what kind of fiction the story will be.

A mysterious and magical forest, a 19^th century English village, a Civil War battlefield, a bullfight ring in the 1920s, a backyard swimming pool in Westchester County, NY or an A & P supermarket in the 1960s—all of these places have been Settings for famous works of fiction.

The variety in just this one short list suggests how much the Setting of a fiction determines what kind of story it is going to be. Certainly the things that can happen in a 1960s American supermarket, and the kinds of people you meet there, can hardly be more different from events and people in English villages in the early 1800s or in battlefields in the Civil War.

Thus the author’s choice of Setting–Time, Place, Culture, and Social Class covered in the novel— is central to its artistry, theme, and plotline. To truly appreciate a fiction’s particular artistry, as well as to discern its purpose, a reader must not skip hurriedly over details of the Setting. In the best fictions, authors deploy Setting not just as a shallow backdrop, but as an element to be savored and examined both for information and for meaning.

Sometimes elements of the Setting become important symbols in the story, a way of foreshadowing an event that is to come, or of summing up a character or a central relationship between people in the fiction. Sometimes, the whole Setting itself is symbolic, not just of a story’s mood but mirroring and helping to explain the psyche of the characters who are undergoing the events of the story.

Scene from Pride and Prejudice set in an early 19th century English village.

Let’s look at some examples of famous Settings and explore what they can convey to readers, as well as how they surround us with aesthetic wonders to savor. Then we will consider Symbols in more detail, both the definition and how to spot and interpret them.

Visit this index for links to all the articles in the Reading Fiction series:

How to Read Fiction Steps 1-7

MJ Booklover

Mary Jane is a longtime literature lover who lived in the Cincinnati area for many years, then in central Louisiana for three years (what a treat!), teaching literature classes at universities in both locations. Now back in the Cincinnati area, she pampers her grandchildren, experiments with cooking, and visits art museums as often as possible.

Reading English Victorian Literature: A Brief Guide to the Classics

August 25, 2022 / MJ Booklover / 2 Comments

Archery was popular with Victorian women, one of the few sports considered proper for women. “The Fair Toxophilites” (lovers of archery) by William Frith.

The English Victorian era, dating from about 1832 to 1901, gave birth to many of the works we now call “classic,” some of the best literature ever written in English.

Now we think of the Victorian Age as quaint and old-fashioned, but in reality it was the era in which our own modern age began. The Industrial Revolution kicked into high gear, bringing rural workers from small villages to gather in big cities, shifting an economy formerly based on agriculture and handicraft industries into one based on high-volume manufacturing. The development of the Steam Railway system and the telegraph and, later, the telephone, connected people formerly divided by great distances, enabling the spread of modern culture.

In literature, the harvest of this period is rich. Victorian novels such as Middlemarch, Bleak House, and Tess of the D’Urbervilles still appear on critics’ lists of all-time best English novels. The last third of the century brought a flowering of new fictional genres: “sensation” fiction, science fiction, supernatural fiction, detective fiction, and adventure “lost world” fiction—genres that writers and readers still enjoy today.

Victorian poetry is no less famous, with works like Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” and Browning’s “My Last Duchess” still anthology staples. Many poets continued the Romantic era focus on Nature and the Middle Ages, while adding a new fascination with the Italian Renaissance. Other poets focused on raising readers’ awareness of social problems, or pushed back against an over-mechanized and coarsening age, singing the glories of hand craftsmanship and “art for art’s sake.”

The end of the era brought great dramatists and playwrights, especially Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, who used side-splitting humor and irony to challenge over-earnest Victorian values they thought to be hypocritical.

Sunset by Samuel Palmer

What were the major “must-read” works of the English Victorian era, and what were they about? To see my picks, check out my annotated reading list (link below). It has comments and descriptions of major literary works of the English Victorian period.

Before you do that, however, you can click “read more” to stay with this post to learn a little more about the Victorian Age, its literary themes and forms, and the culture that informed its literature. This background will help explain the themes, ideas, and problems with which Victorian writers were concerned, all to help you read with more pleasure and understanding.

English Victorian Literature: An Annotated Bibliography

(Click “Continue Reading.”)

MJ Booklover

Distinguishing Tone in Fiction: Tragedy, Pathos, Comedy, Irony

September 1, 2021 / MJ Booklover / 0 Comments

What emotions do different fictional tales evoke? Readers must distinguish tone in fiction to appreciate the total effect of a writer’s art.

“Tone” in fiction guides our emotional responses. Is the story funny, sad, tragic, or ironic, or all these? Let’s take a look at the gamut of Tone in Fiction, with examples and clues to distinguishing tone and irony.

How to Read Fiction Step 6: Distinguishing Tone

When teaching Tone and Irony in fiction, I often began by asking the class to imagine a scenario:

Suppose that I, the instructor, walk into the classroom where all the students are assembled. I stride purposefully toward my desk, but before I can get there, I hit a wet spot on the floor. I slide, falter, and fall– boom!– right onto my derriere. Papers go flying, my handbag spills, books scatter. A classroom tragedy!

Or is it? Maybe it’s not tragic at all, but actually kind of funny? Or even truly slapstick, knee-slapping funny? Or perhaps it’s a great example of irony, since only yesterday I had told students to watch out for wet floors. Or perhaps it’s a satisfying end to some long drama, a karmic come-down for a supercilious professor who enjoys berating her students day after day. (Note: that situation would be a total fiction, of course!)

If someone were telling this story aloud, it would be fairly easy to interpret which of these reactions the teller expects us to have. We could discern it from the speaker’s tone of voice, gestures, and body language. But If this story were being related within a fiction, how can we decipher how the author means readers to experience or interpret this event?

The bare sequence of the events as described doesn’t tell us how to react. What does? For one thing, the kind of language used to describe this event would help shape tone for readers. Is my pain and indignity being described, or is the description comically exaggerated?

In addition, readers also might need to consider more context while interpreting tone. For instance, if I hit my head going down, become comatose, and miss my daughter’s wedding, it might be tragic. If the student I most dislike comes to my aid, and I learn to regard him fondly, readers might experience pathos. If I slip and slide all over the room, waving wild arms before crashing, then get up and just start the class as if nothing happened, just rolling my eyes a little, it might be comic.

Is this situation funny or sad, tragic or ironic, or all? The writer’s tone can tell us.

When reading any good fiction, readers must interpret verbal and contextual cues to figure out just what kind of a story this really is. Those qualities of fiction that evoke particular attitudes and emotional responses in readers work together to produce Tone in fiction. If readers can’t interpret the tone of a scene, or worse, the overall tone of an actual work, they will misunderstand the story that the author is telling.

Keep reading to learn more about how readers can recognize the cues given by an author to establish the Tone of the fiction for readers. I especially want to talk about recognizing comedy and irony, since many students find those especially difficult to recognize in older works where verbal conventions were different.

How to Read Fiction Series

Index to How to Read Fiction posts

Step 1: Style

Step 2: Theme

Step 3: Plot

Step 4 Part 1: Characterization Techniques

Step 4 Part 2: More Characterization Techniques

Step 5: Narrators

MJ Booklover

All About Narrators: Who’s Telling This Story, Anyway?

October 27, 2020 / MJ Booklover / 4 Comments

Tere Marichal, storyteller from Puerto Rico, telling the Afro-Caribbean folktale of Anansi at Biblioteca Juvenil de Mayag during a Multicultural Childrens Book Day.

How to Read Fiction Step 5: Narrators and Point of View

Wading into a new fiction, it’s natural to size up the characters and get a bead on the story line. Who’s the central character? What is her problem or goal? Then off we go, following the storyline up and down until we find out how it all comes out in the end.

But before launching out into the plotline, there’s one big question we need to ask first, and keep asking all the way through: who is telling this story, anyway?

Is it someone who is in the story with a limited view of events, or someone outside looking omnisciently down? Is it someone we can trust or someone we must question?

A work of fiction is not just a description of a series of incidents; it is a description of a series of incidents as told by a particular teller. Sometimes a fiction is more about the teller than it is about the events in the storyline itself. Whatever the narrator choice or mode of telling, this important aspect of great fiction is something we don’t want to miss.

In this post I’m going to talk about the many different types of narrators an author could choose when constructing a fiction, and how that artistic choice influences the story that we experience as readers.

Old novels on shelf dwnsz

How to Read Fiction Series

Step 1: Style

Step 2: Theme

Step 3: Plot

Step 4 Part 1: Characterization Techniques

Step 4 Part 2: More Characterization Techniques

Step 6: Tone in Fiction

MJ Booklover

Defoe and the Invention of Realism in the Novel

September 16, 2020 / MJ Booklover / 2 Comments

Daniel Defoe

Realism in the Novel is an old story today. But at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Realism was something new, and Daniel Defoe was one of the first writers to practice it.

In the early 1700s, a metamorphosis in English fiction writing took place. Fewer stories featured high-born princes and gorgeous ladies, clever rogues, or their slaves and minions. Instead, fiction focused more on clerks, maids, sailors, lawyers, bankers, bakers—realistic, ordinary people that an 18th century reader might actually meet.

Settings moved from vaguely described kingdoms lying somewhere in foreign lands to everyday places, like the streets of London or Colchester, or the inside of a shop, rooming house, or jail. Instead of characters who spoke in high-flown witty phrases manifesting extremes of emotion, fictional characters slowly began to talk more and more like real people.

Before the advent of this newer way of writing fiction, which became known as Realism, writers had not focused on providing “verisimilitude” to their tales. That is, they had not developed all the writerly techniques that make readers feel that a story could have happened in the factual world, the one they saw daily out of their windows.

But with Daniel Defoe’s publication of Robinson Crusoe in 1719 and Moll Flanders in 1722, “verisimilitude” is exactly what readers saw: fictions that seemed as real as actual memoirs or biographical accounts. In fact, many of Robinson Crusoe’s earliest readers believed that this fictional account was a true story. With Crusoe and Moll Flanders, and other novels to come, Daniel Defoe was helping invent something that seemed new: Realism and the Novel genre, which developed as showcase for the Realist’s techniques and aims.

Defoe made his storytelling in Crusoe feel real by basing its form on a popular memoir of an actual castaway, Alexander Selkirk. Defoe populated his faux-memoir Crusoe’s pages with numerous mundane details to make readers feel he was writing about the real world, not just dreaming up wild events in his imagination.

In Moll Flanders, the Defoe novel that I know the best, he continued to experiment and develop with techniques to make a story feel real, so much so that you can watch Defoe’s techniques develop and the story’s texture evolve as you read it from one end to the other.

To learn more about where Defoe got inspiration for this new way of writing, and how he invented and honed his Realism, come along for a closer look at Moll Flanders, and an important fictional predecessor to Defoe, a famous teller of sexy romantic tales, Aphra Behn. And before that, we’ll talk a bit about whether Realism is really a “thing,” and if so, where it might have come from.

“Before”–painting by William Hogarth

Links to Related Topics:

Reading Restoration and 18th Century English Literature: Background information

Timeline and Reading List: Restoration and 18th Century English Literature

MJ Booklover

Is Now the Time to Read That Beefy Classic 19th Century Novel?

March 23, 2020 / MJ Booklover / 2 Comments

Time to Read? Pick up a Beefy 19th Century Novel!

Here’s a list of great 19th Century Novels to try. You can find inexpensive copies, or download and read for free!

With a pandemic raging, many of us are in official or self-imposed quarantine. I send you prayers and hopes that you and your loved ones are well, or soon will be, and that this epidemic will soon pass. If you are well but stuck inside, maybe now is the time to pick up one of those beefy classic novels you always meant to read.

But what to go for first?

Here I offer a smattering of my suggestions for best overall Big Reads that, for me, offer not just classic status, but also engaging stories and characters, worthy and thought-provoking ideas, and immersion in other times and places in western cultural history.

The great thing about choosing Classics for reading is that you can find many of them online for free, or pick up inexpensive second-hand copies from online booksellers. If you have a Kindle or other e-reader, you can even download copies of many classic works from Gutenberg.org in the correct format. The listings below provide links to Gutenberg download pages for each.

Here is the link to Gutenberg’s Book Search page, where you can search for any other out-of-copyright book you’d like to read.

A word to the wise: be patient when first starting your Classic Read. It might take a chapter or two to become accustomed to the more elaborate language and leisurely pace of fiction written in bygone years. But if the experience of most of my students is any indication, you won’t read far into these great books before you are wholly absorbed in the story-line, captivated by the characters, and stimulated by the thoughtful commentaries about being human that these great authors can offer.

Here are my picks for some great classics I think you would like to meet.

Note: If you want to choose readings from other eras, visit our Literature Lists and Timelines category page for ideas. Make a choice then search the Gutenberg link above for online copies.

older man reading book-Piacquadio dwnsz

MJ Booklover

Dickens Talk: A Fun Conversation on Social Media

October 3, 2018 / MJ Booklover / 2 Comments

Color photo up close: smartphone screen showing social media icons, Facebook in center.

Classic literature comes to Social Media

If you are a Facebook member, you may have seen this challenge going around on people’s Timelines: a friend nominates you to post the cover of a book that is significant for you, one book cover for each of seven days—just the cover, with (I quote) “No Explanation.” With my reputation for loving books, it’s not surprising that this challenge came around to me. With my penchant for talking about books, it’s also not surprising that I couldn’t keep my mouth shut (or my keyboard silent) to follow the “No Explanation” rule.

In short, I explained.

I commented briefly on why I chose David Copperfield as one of my “significant to me” book selections. I’m glad I did, because the comment gave rise to a fun and interesting conversation about Dickens with several of my friends.

This was so much fun, I wanted to share it with my blog readers as well. My friends kindly gave me permission to post our Dickens chat here, just to show how much fun it can be to have shared experience and love of a classic author. Several different topics come up, as you can see, the usual case when readers discuss an author of sufficient depth and accomplishment to be valued as classic.

MJ Booklover

Going Deeper: Five More Characterization Techniques; How to Read Fiction Step 4 Part 2

August 20, 2018 / MJ Booklover / 0 Comments

Barefoot young man wearing suspenders sits in wooden chair in middle of dirt road with book open on his head and book pages flying around him in the air. Characterization techniques help characters spring from pages as if real.

Characterization techniques help characters fly from the page. Readers experience them as if they are real people.

In “How to Read Fiction Step 4, Part 1,” we discussed four ways that writers create living characters in fiction, focusing on the four qualities readers are most likely to perceive first: Characterization Through Naming (1), Through Physical Description (2), Through “Tags” and Catchphrases (3), and Through Associated Objects (4). These characterization techniques give readers an immediate and forceful first impression of characters as they first meet them in fiction.

As readers read further and deeper into a tale, they encounter fuller and more subtle means of characterization. Narrators and other characters give readers guidance about main characters. Even more powerful, the characters reveal their own personalities and psyches through their own words and actions. Let’s wade in deeper to see how these techniques work to flesh out fully-developed characters.

MJ Booklover

How Characterization Makes Characters Live: How to Read Fiction Step 4 Part 1

August 13, 2018 / MJ Booklover / 0 Comments

20th century typewriter in turquoise, shown with paper inserted and cup of coffee to the left--writer's characterization tools!

Words are the writer’s only tools for characterization in fiction. Just 26 letters can bring hundreds of characters to life.

Yours could be any one of thousands of great literary characters–Atticus Finch, Jo March, Sherlock Holmes, Elizabeth Bennet, Janie Crawford, Clarissa Dalloway, Jane Eyre, Holden Caulfield, Huckleberry Finn, Emma Bovary, Jay Gatsby, Raskolnikov, or the Artful Dodger; all serious readers have their favorites.

The characters in a novel or story are usually the first thing everyone wants to talk about. When I talk to excited readers about fiction they like, most people speak about the fictional characters as if they are real people:

“I love Lizzie Bennett’s independence, and she’s funny!”
“Holden Caulfield is a brat but I like the way he sees through all the fakiness.”
“Gatsby seems so romantic and so lonely.”
“I like watching Janie search so hard for her identity.”
“My heart goes out to Jane Eyre, she’s so mistreated!”

But of course, literary characters are not real people. Writers only make us feel as if they are. How do writers convey to readers the sense that their characters are actual human beings?

Writers use a multitude of clever methods to bring their characters to life. These characterization techniques sometimes vary according to literary fashion, and some endure through every era of storytelling. Learning to spot methods of characterization in fiction helps us come to a deeper understanding of the personality and psychology of a character as the writer conceived it. It also helps us see and enjoy themes or plot conflicts.

Even more, recognizing characterization techniques points out the degree of a writer’s skill, so we can see how one writer differs from another and appreciate excellent fictional artistry all the more.

Woman in Bookshop. Books are lining the walls and woman, wearing skirt, jacket, and light pack, is scanning shelves.

In one bookshop alone are thousands of characters for readers to meet and get to know through clever characterization techniques.

MJ Booklover

Trollope’s “The Warden”: Empathy v. The Media

July 26, 2018 / MJ Booklover / 4 Comments

View of Medieval almshouses in yellow stone with roofed walk and row of arched supports.

St. John’s Almshouses in Sherborne could be a model for Hiram’s Hospital in “The Warden.”*

Do you like taking quizzes? Try this one:

What famous novelist attacked false news and the unbalanced power of a money-driven mainstream media, and in what novel?
What famous novelist, in this same novel, faulted popular storytellers for creating blind emotion and simplistic portrayals of “good” or “bad” people?
What famous novelist attacked a famous public intellectual for his bombastic cynicism about everything in the modern world?
What novelist thought the central character of a work should be neither a faultless victim nor a morally pristine super-person, but rather an ordinary man, weak but well-meaning, a “mixed” character with good and bad, noble and foolish characteristics all mixed together?

As contemporary as these ideas may sound, the answer to all these questions is not someone writing today, but a writer whose 200th birthday was celebrated in 2015, along with his novel that was published in Victorian England back in 1855: writer Anthony Trollope and his sweet little gem of a book, The Warden.

MJ Booklover

Tag: classic fiction (Page 1 of 2)

Unlocking Setting, Symbol, and Scope: Reading Fiction Step 7

Reading English Victorian Literature: A Brief Guide to the Classics

Distinguishing Tone in Fiction: Tragedy, Pathos, Comedy, Irony

All About Narrators: Who’s Telling This Story, Anyway?

How to Read Fiction Step 5: Narrators and Point of View

Defoe and the Invention of Realism in the Novel

Is Now the Time to Read That Beefy Classic 19th Century Novel?

Here’s a list of great 19th Century Novels to try. You can find inexpensive copies, or download and read for free!

Going Deeper: Five More Characterization Techniques; How to Read Fiction Step 4 Part 2

How Characterization Makes Characters Live: How to Read Fiction Step 4 Part 1

Trollope’s “The Warden”: Empathy v. The Media

Never Miss a Post!

Search the Site

Categories

Recent Posts

Archives

Privacy Policy: Click Here

Cookie Policy: Click Here

Newsletter Sign-Up

Author Login

Categories

Email Read Great Literature

Search the Site

© Read Great Literature and Mary Jane Brown, 2017-2025.