![]() ![]() ![]() He employed the metafictionist’s narrative tricks, for example, not to show that fiction-and, by extension, life-is mere artifice, meaningless play, but to put those tricks to some higher purpose. It is perhaps best to think of Gardner not as a writer who belongs to any one school but instead as a writer who, in terms of style, subject, and moral vision, mediates between the various extremes of innovation and tradition, freedom and order, individual and society. He was, as well, an academically inclined New Novelist whose work is formally innovative, stylistically extravagant, openly parodic, and highly allusive yet, at the same time, he was an accessible, popular storyteller, one whom some critics, in the wake of On Moral Fiction, have labeled a reactionary traditionalist. ![]() He was alternately a realist and a fabulist, a novelist of ideas and a writer who maintained that characters and human situations are always more important than philosophy. John Gardner (1933 –1982) is a difficult writer to classify. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |