Experiencing Fiction

In Experiencing Fiction James Phelan develops a provocative and engaging affirmative answer to the question Can we experience narrative fiction in similar ways? Phelan grounds that answer in two elements of narrative located at the intersection between authorial design and reader judgments and progressions. Phelan contends that focusing on the three main kinds of judgmentinterpretive ethical and aestheticand on the principles underlying a narratives movement from beginning to end reveals the experience of reading fiction to be potentially sharable. In Part One Phelan skillfully analyzes progressions and judgments in narratives with a high degree of Jane Austens Persuasion Toni Morrisons Beloved Edith Whartons Roman Fever and Ian McEwans Atonement . In Part Two Phelan turns his attention to the different relationships between judgments and progressions in hybrid formsin the lyric narratives of Ernest Hemingways A Clean Well-Lighted Place Sandra Cisneross Woman Hollering Creek and Robert Frosts Home Burial and in the portrait narratives of Alice Munros Prue and Ann Beatties Janus. More generally Phelan moves back and forth between the exploration of theoretical principles and the detailed work of interpretation. As a result Experiencing Fiction combines Phelans fresh and compelling readings of numerous innovative narratives with his fullest articulation of the rhetorical theory of narrative.