Buch, Englisch, Band 13, 212 Seiten, Format (B × H): 150 mm x 220 mm
Reihe: Cross/Cultures
Narrative Structure in Margaret Laurence’s <i>The Stone Angel</i> and <i>The Diviners</i>
Buch, Englisch, Band 13, 212 Seiten, Format (B × H): 150 mm x 220 mm
Reihe: Cross/Cultures
ISBN: 978-90-5183-743-8
Verlag: Brill | Rodopi
The central structural principle of The Stone Angel is its dovetailing of past and present scenes. Temporal arrangement, reflecting the frequency and duration of Hagar's memories, reveals the hold of memory over the central character and her attempts to suppress her fear of mortality. Hagar-as-narrator manipulates character-presentation and description to her own advantage. In a basically oppositional structure, her need for control is reflected in the neat ordering of the narrative. The verbal texture of the novel serves to establish a value system that insists on the superiority of imported culture over Western Canadian forms.
The Diviners shares a number of narrative similarities with The Stone Angel, but the latter's formal rigidity has yielded, by the time Laurence writes her last novel, to the concept of multiplicity - characters, time planes, perspectives and narrative voices (including metafictional commentaries). Textual coherence is secured via narrative strategies (including typography, generational paradigms, repetition, parallelism, intertextuality, and tropological patterning) that render the novel "readable" and present experience as ordered in a time of cultural flux and personal crisis.