Review: The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel, by Brian Gingrich

Book Review| March 01 2024 Review: The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel, by Brian Gingrich Brian Gingrich, The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. ix + 202. $84. Elisha Cohn Elisha Cohn Cornell University Elisha Cohn is an Associate Professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. She is the author of Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (Oxford University Press, 2016) and has published in a variety of other venues including Contemporary Literature, Victorian Studies, and the Journal of Victorian Culture. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Literature (2024) 78 (4): 316–319. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2024.78.4.316 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Elisha Cohn; Review: The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel, by Brian Gingrich. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 March 2024; 78 (4): 316–319. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2024.78.4.316 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search In The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel, Brian Gingrich reframes classic problems of narrative structure, arguing for pace—and not reference as such—as a master concept in the emergence of British realism. The book ranges from a comparativist discussion of the late eighteenth-century novel through the heightened moments that structure "epiphanic modernism" (p. 159). Offering a structural analysis of the way realist narrative manages temporal flow, Gingrich makes the case that realism as it emerges in the late eighteenth century is foundationally based on a tension between "scene" and "summary." Gingrich highlights these terms from Gerard Genette's Narrative Discourse, pointing out that they were demoted from a place of prominence in Mieke Bal's Narratology in 2017. Gingrich recovers these terms in order to explain pace, which he identifies as a fundamental rhythm of narrative: enacted scenes are interspersed, to varying degrees, with summaries that transmit compressed... You do not currently have access to this content.