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Affective Narration in Little Fires Everywhere and Aesthetic Pleasure in Its Readers

Zhixian Cheng

Abstract


Every story depicts and inspires emotion, while the convergence of text and reader brings the literary work into existence. In Little
Fires Everywhere (2017), Celeste Ng pours her emotions into the novel, vividly depicts the emotional course of the girls towards love and
maturity, and sets up with her exquisite artistic techniques the sophisticated structures concerning the rewritten narrative prototype. Using
the theory of gap-filling, originated from reader-response criticism, which examines the reading process of the reader, and the concept of the
romantic love narrative prototype from affective narratology, which conforms to the readers expectation, this paper explores how Celeste Ng
applies unique narrative techniques to shatter readers expectations and set the blank in the novel, and why these can cause readers aesthetic
pleasure. Meanwhile, it also endows the novel with unique aesthetic intensity.

Keywords


Little Fires Everywhere; Celeste Ng; Affective Narration; Aesthetic Pleasure

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References


[1] Hogan, Patrick Colm. A Passion for Plot: Prolegomena to Affective Narratology. Symplok?, vol. 18, no. 1-2, 2010, p. 65.

[2] Iser, Wolfgang. The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach. New Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2017, pp. 279-299.

[3] Hogan, Patrick Colm. Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. University of Nebraska Press, 2011: 125.

[4] Hogan, Patrick Colm. Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. University of Nebraska Press, 2011: 81.

[5] Burke, Michael. The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. Routledge, 2014: 523.

[6] Ng, Celeste. Little Fires Everywhere. Thorpe, Isis, 2017: 136-137.

[7] Ng, Celeste. Little Fires Everywhere. Thorpe, Isis, 2017: 254.

[8] Hogan, Patrick Colm. Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. University of Nebraska Press, 2011: 109.

[9] Hogan, Patrick Colm. What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion. Cambridge University Press, 2014: 95.

[10] Ng, Celeste. Little Fires Everywhere. Thorpe, Isis, 2017: 240-245.


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