Elements of Fiction

ELEMENTS OF FICTION
1. Elements of Fiction
The six major elements of fiction are character, plot, point of view, setting, style, and
theme.
1. Character -- A figure in a literary work (personality, gender, age, etc). E. M. Forester
makes a distinction between flat and round characters. Flat characters are types or
caricatures defined by a single idea of quality, whereas round characters have the
three-dimensional complexity of real people.
A character is a participant in the story, and is usually a person, but may be any
persona, identity, or entity whose existence originates from a fictional work or
performance.
2. Plot - the major events that move the action in a narrative. It is the sequence of
major events in a story, usually in a cause-effect relation.
3. Point of View -- the vantage point from which a narrative is told. A narrative is
typically told from a first-person or third-person point of view. In a narrative told from a
first-person perspective, the author tells the story through a character who refers to
himself or herself as "I." Third person narratives come in two types: omniscient and
limited. An author taking an omniscient point of view assumes the vantage point of an
all-knowing narrator able not only to recount the action thoroughly and reliably but also
to enter the mind of any character in the work or any time in order to reveal his or her
thoughts, feelings, and beliefs directly to the reader. An author using the limited point of
view recounts the story through the eyes of a single character (or occasionally more
than one, but not all or the narrator would be an omniscient narrator).
4. Setting - That combination of place, historical time, and social milieu that provides
the general background for the characters and plot of a literary work. The general
setting of a work may differ from the specific setting of an individual scene or event.
5.Style -- The authors type of diction (choice of words), syntax (arrangement of words),
and other linguistic features of a work.
Style includes the multitude of choices fiction writers make, consciously or not, in the
process of writing a story. It encompasses not only the big-picture, strategic choices
such as point of view and choice of narrator, but also tactical choices of grammar,
punctuation, word usage, sentence and paragraph length and structure, tone, the use of
imagery, chapter selection, titles, etc. In the process of creating a story, these choices
meld to become the writer's voice, his or her own unique style.
6. Theme(s) -- The central and dominating idea (or ideas) in a literary work. The term
also indicates a message or moral implicit in any work of art.
2. Two purposes of poetry according to Horace and Percy Bysshe Shelley
The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold: by one it creates new materials of
knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to
reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be
called the beautiful and the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired
than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the
accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of
assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has then become too
unwidely for that which animates it.
For Shelley, "poets ... are not only the authors of language and of music, of the
dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws and
the founders of civil society..." Social and linguistic order are not the sole products of the
rational faculty, as language is "arbitrarily produced by the imagination" and reveals "the
before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension" of a
higher beauty and truth. In short, "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the
world".
Shelley does not claim language is poetry on the grounds that language is the medium
of poetry; rather he recognises in the creation of language an adherence to the poetic
precepts of order, harmony, unity, and a desire to express delight in the beautiful.
Aesthetic admiration of "the true and the beautiful" is provided with an important social
aspect which extends beyond communication and precipitates self-awareness. Poetry
and the various modes of art it incorporates are directly involved with the social
activities of life.
Shelley writes in Defence that while "ethical science arranges the elements which
poetry has created," and leads to a moral civil life, poetry acts in a way that "awakens
and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand
unapprehended combinations of thought".
Shelley sought to show that poets make morality and established the legal norms in a
civil society thus creating the groundwork for the other branches in a community.

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What are the six major elements of fiction according to the passage?

What are the two purposes of poetry according to Horace and Percy Bysshe Shelley?

ELEMENTS OF FICTION

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