Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form: Suspense, Closure, Minor Characters (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780810141988)

Three questions of novelistic form preoccupied Fyodor Dostoevsky throughout his career: how to build suspense, how to end a narrative effectively, and how to distribute attention among major and minor characters. For Dostoevsky, these were much more than practical questions about novelistic craft; they were ethical questions as well. Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form traces Dostoevsky's indefatigable investigations into the ethical implications of his own formal choices. Drawing on his drafts, notebooks, and writings on aesthetics, Greta Matzner-Gore argues that Dostoevsky wove the moral and formal questions that obsessed him into the fabric of his last three novels: Demons, The Adolescent, and The Brothers Karamazov. In so doing, he anticipated some of the most pressing debates taking place in the study of narrative ethics today.

Author: Greta Matzner-Gore
ISBN-10: 0810141981
ISBN-13: 9780810141988
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Language: English
Published: 06/15/2020
Pages: 160
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.70d