Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance is Richard Powers' first novel, published in 1985. The novel follows the journeys of three young European boys represented in a c. 1913 or 1914 photograph by August Sander.
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance is Richard Powers' first novel, published in 1985. The novel follows the journeys of three young European boys represented in a c. 1913 or 1914 photograph by August Sander.
Two parallel narratives – one in the voice suspected to be the author, whose surname, we learn, starts with P – offer contemporary perspectives and illustrate the interconnectedness of events. These voices provide contemporary perspectives on technology, the major theme of the novel. A series of rather academic essays on the nature of photography, including quotes from Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt – in the authorial narrative voice of Mr P – are interspersed with the story.
The story begins with the authorial narrative voice of Mr P. first sighting the photograph taken in the months before the outbreak of World War I of three young boys in Germany, a photograph which is titled Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance and is being exhibited at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The novel follows the fictional fates of these three young men in war time, as well as the stories of Peter Mays, a technical editor for a 1980s electronics magazine, and Mr P. – the first-person narrator of sections of the novel – who is obsessed with the photograph and with concepts of photography and technology.
Powers's later novel Galatea 2.2 , published in 1995, uses the first person perspective of semifictional narrator Richard Powers to describe to a large extent the conditions under which Powers wrote Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance attempts to balance the technological advancements that caused the large scale deaths in World War I with those that created art for the masses in the form of photography.
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An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of letters between the fictional characters of a narrative. The term is often extended to cover novels that intersperse documents of other kinds with the letters, most commonly diary entries and newspaper clippings, and sometimes considered to include novels composed of documents even if they do not include letters at all. More recently, epistolaries may include electronic documents such as recordings and radio, blog posts, and e-mails. The word epistolary is derived from Latin from the Greek word epistolē, meaning a letter . This type of fiction is also sometimes known by the German term Briefroman or more generally as epistolary fiction.
A first-person narrative is a mode of storytelling in which a storyteller recounts events from that storyteller's own personal point of view, using first-person grammar such as "I", "me", "my", and "myself". It must be narrated by a first-person character, such as a protagonist, re-teller, witness, or peripheral character. Alternatively, in a visual storytelling medium, the first-person perspective is a graphical perspective rendered through a character's visual field, so the camera is "seeing" out of a character's eyes.
A story within a story, also referred to as an embedded narrative, is a literary device in which a character within a story becomes the narrator of a second story. Multiple layers of stories within stories are sometimes called nested stories. A play may have a brief play within it, such as in Shakespeare's play Hamlet; a film may show the characters watching a short film; or a novel may contain a short story within the novel. A story within a story can be used in all types of narration including poems, songs, and video games.
Richard Powers is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology. His novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction. He has also won many other awards over the course of his career, including a MacArthur Fellowship. As of 2023, Powers has published thirteen novels and has taught at the University of Illinois and Stanford University. He won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory.
The French Lieutenant's Woman is a 1969 postmodern historical fiction novel by John Fowles. The plot explores the fraught relationship of gentleman and amateur naturalist Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff, the former governess and independent woman with whom he falls in love. The novel builds on Fowles' authority in Victorian literature, both following and critiquing many of the conventions of period novels.
A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether nonfictional or fictional. Narratives can be presented through a sequence of written or spoken words, through still or moving images, or through any combination of these. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, which is derived from the adjective gnarus. The formal and literary process of constructing a narrative—narration—is one of the four traditional rhetorical modes of discourse, along with argumentation, description, and exposition. This is a somewhat distinct usage from narration in the narrower sense of a commentary used to convey a story. Many additional narrative techniques, particularly literary ones, are used to build and enhance any given story.
An unreliable narrator is a narrator whose credibility is compromised. They can be found in fiction and film, and range from children to mature characters. The term was coined in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. While unreliable narrators are almost by definition first-person narrators, arguments have been made for the existence of unreliable second- and third-person narrators, especially within the context of film and television, and sometimes also in literature.
Bleak House is a novel by Charles Dickens, first published as a 20-episode serial between March 1852 and September 1853. The novel has many characters and several subplots, and is told partly by the novel's heroine, Esther Summerson, and partly by an omniscient narrator. At the centre of Bleak House is a long-running legal case in the Court of Chancery, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which comes about because a testator has written several conflicting wills. In a preface to the 1853 first edition, Dickens said there were many actual precedents for his fictional case. One such was probably Thellusson v Woodford, in which a will read in 1797 was contested and not determined until 1859. Though many in the legal profession criticised Dickens's satire as exaggerated, Bleak House helped support a judicial reform movement that culminated in the enactment of legal reform in the 1870s.
Narration is the use of a written or spoken commentary to convey a story to an audience. Narration is conveyed by a narrator: a specific person, or unspecified literary voice, developed by the creator of the story to deliver information to the audience, particularly about the plot: the series of events. Narration is a required element of all written stories, presenting the story in its entirety. However, narration is merely optional in most other storytelling formats, such as films, plays, television shows, and video games, in which the story can be conveyed through other means, like dialogue between characters or visual action.
Free indirect speech is a literary term that refers to writing a character's first-person thoughts in the voice of the third-person narrator. It is a style using aspects of third-person narration conjoined with the essence of first-person direct speech. The technique is also referred to as free indirect discourse, free indirect style, or, in French, discours indirect libre.
Charlotte Sometimes is a children's novel by the English writer Penelope Farmer, published in 1969 in Britain and the United States. It is the third and best-known of three books featuring the Makepeace sisters, Charlotte and Emma, sometimes known as the Aviary Hall books. The story follows a girl starting at boarding school who finds one morning she has traveled mysteriously back more than 40 years and is known as Clare. Charlotte and Clare change places each night, alternating between 1918 and Charlotte's time; although Charlotte and Clare never meet, they communicate through diary notes in an exercise book. The story is written from Charlotte's point of view: the narrative never follows Clare. Charlotte becomes trapped in Clare's time, struggling to maintain her identity.
Lark Rise to Candleford is a trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels by Flora Thompson about the countryside of north-east Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, England, at the end of the 19th century. The stories were previously published separately as Lark Rise in 1939, Over to Candleford in 1941 and Candleford Green in 1943. They were first published together in 1945.
“Both Parties Concerned” is an uncollected work of short fiction by J. D. Salinger which appeared in the 26 February, 1944 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.
Why Are We In Vietnam? (WWVN) is a 1967 novel by the American author Norman Mailer. It focuses on a hunting trip to the Brooks Range in Alaska where a young man is brought by his father, a wealthy businessman who works for a company that makes cigarette filters and is obsessed with killing a grizzly bear. As the novel progresses, the protagonist is increasingly disillusioned that his father resorts to hunting tactics that seem dishonest and weak, including the use of a helicopter and taking credit for killing a bear. At the end of the novel, the protagonist tells the reader that he is soon going to serve in the Vietnam War as a soldier.
The Gangster We Are All Looking For is the first novel by Vietnamese-American author lê thi diem thúy, published in 2003. It was first published as a short piece in The Best American Essays of 1997 and was also awarded a Pushcart Prize “Special Mention.”
Will Grayson, Will Grayson is a novel by John Green and David Levithan, published in April 2010 by Dutton Juvenile. The book's narrative is divided evenly between two boys named Will Grayson, one of whom is straight and is referred to in capitalized letters, and the other who is gay and is referred to in lowercase. Presented in alternating chapters, Green wrote all of the chapters for "Will Grayson" (capitalized) and Levithan wrote all the chapters for "will grayson" (lowercase). The novel debuted on The New York Times children's best-seller list after its release and remained there for three weeks. It was the first LGBT-themed young adult novel to make it to that list.
The War of the Worlds is a science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells. It was written between 1895 and 1897, and serialised in Pearson's Magazine in the UK and Cosmopolitan magazine in the US in 1897. The full novel was first published in hardcover in 1898 by William Heinemann. The War of the Worlds is one of the earliest stories to detail a conflict between humankind and an extraterrestrial race. The novel is the first-person narrative of an unnamed protagonist in Surrey and his younger brother in London as southern England is invaded by Martians. It is one of the most commented-on works in the science fiction canon.
In literature, mood is the atmosphere of the narrative. Mood is created by means of setting, attitude, and descriptions. Though atmosphere and setting are connected, they may be considered separately to a degree. Atmosphere is the aura of mood that surrounds the story. It is to fiction what the sensory level is to poetry or mise-en-scene is to cinema. Mood is established to affect the reader emotionally and psychologically and to provide a feeling for the narrative.
The hybrid novel is a form of fiction, characterized by reaching beyond the limits of the anticipated medium through the incorporation of varying storytelling methods, such as poetry, photography, collage, maps, diagrams, posters and illustrations. The hybrid novel refers to a broad spectrum of literary work such as the graphic narrative and fusion texts.
Young Farmers, also known as Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance, is a black and white photograph taken by August Sander in 1914. It is one of his better known photographs and it was included in his photographic book Face of Our Time (1929).