Prose Fiction

Works of prose fiction get reviewed in daily newspapers even on television. Some get made into blockbusters movie. A few novelist can become so successful that they start making serious money. So, for quite a lot of people, prose fiction is what literature is. In Ancient Greece and Rome most literature was in verse. We may read Homer's Iliad or Virgil's Aeneid now as prose novels of a sort, but originally they are verse epics.

     Even if people do not think of literature automatically as prose, they may assume that is fiction— but that also historically specific way of thinking. 'Prose' and 'fiction' : these are important concepts and they shouldn't be taken for granted.

 

Prose fiction genes — and narrative

     Prose fiction consists of many sub-genres. Some of these are usually defined quite simply by length. The main category are the novel and the short story. For example Pride and Prejudice, which is a couple of hundred pages long in most editions, is a novel. A fairly good working definition of a novel might be a fictional narrative that is long enough to be published as a book by itself.

     A narrative is a sequence of events, fictional, or non-fictional, told or narrated by someone to someone else. In literally narrative, the person who narrates the narrative is the narrator. The person to whom the narrative is narrated may be called the audience or the reader, but is sometimes termed the naratee. The naratee is the person to whom the narrative seems to be directed: in that sense, producing a narrative involves creating a reader, just as it involves creating a narrator and characters. The whole business of how narrators narrate narratives to narratees is a sub-discipline in itself, and is called narratology.

Prose fiction varies between text than can fill a whole book but do not seem quite long/big enough. Some people might want to categorize or make a list of what could be called a novel, novellas, long or short story but there is no particular exact requirements to categorize. Those categorize does not matter because texts have a different purpose.

There are a lot of literary categorisations such as "tragedy" , "romance" and else but it is only a tool for the reader to generates a thought to open and work on real texts. 

Vania Puteri

Yunindya Palarani

Salma Lista