![]() The literary child is able to deconstruct the accepted traditions and forms in ways that highlight their inherent assumptions and contradictions, exposing the absurdity of their apparent significance or unity. While David’s earlier invented narratives show the stylistic, thematic, and ideological influence of existing genres of fiction, later episodes indicate that his engagement with various genre conventions is becoming more self-conscious and critical. The innovative tutor in the novel incorporates popular fiction into her teaching of David, the novel’s main protagonist, who has storytelling talents but she encourages the literary child to reconstruct and re-narrate the familiar stories as he reads. ![]() ![]() It foregrounds an explicitly metafictive reflection, confronting the child readers with the fact that they are reading a constructed text. ![]() This effect of making the conventional deployment of the plot line strange serves a didactic function by discouraging the readers from taking the style and content for granted. Lloyd Alexander’s metafictional novel for children, The Gawgon and The Boy, makes use of the discontinuity between multiple layers of narrative to impede the action of the novel and disclose the manipulative contrivances of fiction and its medial quality. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |