HISTORY: BIOGRAPHY: THE NOVEL: Creasy: Fifteen Decisive Battles of the Macaulay: chap. i of the History of Eng land. Prescott: Conquest of Peru. Lockhart: Life of Scott. Morley: English Men of Letters. Palmer: Life of Alice Freeman Palmer. Dickens: Hard Times; Barnaby Rudge. Hardy: Far from the Madding Crowd; Trollope: Barchester Towers. THE SHORT-STORY: Aldrich: Marjorie Daw. Allen: Flute and Violin. Anstey: The Black Poodle. La Grande Bretèche. Bunner: A Sisterly Scheme. Dickens: A Child's Dream of a Star. Freeman: A New England Nun. Garland: Up the Coolly. Hardy: The Withered Arm. The Three Strangers. The Melancholy Hussar of the Harte: The Outcasts of Poker Flat. Hawthorne: The Great Stone Face. Hewlett: Madonna of the Peach Tree. Irving: Rip Van Winkle. Kipling: The Man who would be King. THE SHORT-STORY: Kipling: Without Benefit of Clergy. Matthews: Vignettes of Manhattan (se lections). Maupassant: The Necklace. The Piece of String. The Man with the Blue Eyes. The Coward. Merimée: Mateo Falcone. Morrison: On the Stairs. The Omnibus. Poe: The Gold-Bug. The Fall of the House of Usher. The Cask of Amontillado. Smith: A Night Out. Boggs becomes Dramatic ("The Wood-Fire in No. 3"). Stevenson: The Merry Men. Markheim. Stockton: The Lady or the Tiger? Turgeneff: A Lear of the Steppes. The Bible: Ruth, Esther, and selections ad lib. Gesta Romanorum: selections. The Arabian Nights: selections. My obligations are many. One cannot discuss the principles herein considered and fail to recognize indebtedness to Professors Barrett Wendell and Bliss Perry of Harvard, Professor Charles S. Baldwin of Columbia, and many others. I have endeavored, in the text, to give credit for such indebtedness, and in the footnotes I have specified the various publishers who have courteously allowed the use of copyrighted matter. I take this opportunity also of expressing to my colleagues - especially to Samuel E. Allen, M.A. and George B. Dutton, Ph.D. — my obligations for their valuable and generous assistance in preparing this work for publication. WILLIAMS COLLEGE WILLIAMSTOWN, MASSACHUSETTS C. L, M. THE RHETORICAL PRINCIPLES OF NARRATION CHAPTER I DEFINITION Narration "recounts the particulars of an occurrence, or makes a statement of facts, in chronological order.” - Standard Dictionary. Narration is "an orderly recital of the details and particulars of some transaction or event, or of some series of transactions or events." Century Dictionary. "Narration is the recounting, in succession, of the particulars that together make up a transaction." - GENUNG: Working Principles of Rhetoric. AN examination of these three definitions, which may fairly be called typical, reveals the two underlying principles of all narrative writing: (a) the conception of a unit, variously termed an "occurrence," occurrence," a "transaction," and an "event"; and (b) the successive details that constitute this unit, arranged in their chronological order, in an "orderly recital," in a "series." From these essential parts of the three definitions in question it becomes apparent that the time-element plays a very important part in the process of narration, indeed, that it is fundamental. The unit variously denominated as an "occurrence," a "transaction," an “event," is from its very nature temporal. It indicates a circumstance that presents itself in the course of time; it is generally a part of some larger temporal whole, it may be of an era, or of a life, or of a mere brief experi |