Elements of Historical Fiction

Elements of Historical Fiction Historical Fiction A literary genre in which the narrative of a work is set in the past and features characters, places, events and experiences based on true historical events. Characteristics of Historical Fiction in a Film Setting – This identifies the authentic historical time period and geographical location(s) that the film portrays. Characters – In a historical fiction, characters may be fictional while others may be based on a true historical figure(s) who lived during the time period. Protagonist – The leading character(s) in a fictional work. Antagonist – Characters that actively oppose or act hostile toward the protagonist(s) or the film’s resolution. Characterization – This references how characters are portrayed throughout the film. Through dialogue, physical appearance, and interactions with other characters, viewers can understand the characters connection to the historical period of the film. Conflict – The main characters are involved in a dilemma that is connected to historical events captured in the film. The protagonist(s) in the film experience(s) both internal conflict and external conflict. Internal conflict is experienced when the protagonist suffers inwardly. External conflict is caused by the surrounding environment the protagonist finds himself or herself in. Imagery – This is used to add to the visuals of the film. These include symbols, colors, objects, etc… that stand for more than their literal meaning and represent something more. Narrator Perspective – The point of view from which the story is told. This point of view also sets the tone of the story in the film. Plot –The sequence of events that make up the story of the film. These events can be based on true historical scenarios or can be fictional. The plot is the foundation of a story and is composed of five main elements: Introduction, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, and Resolution. Theme –The main idea(s) or message(s) of a story portrayed in the film. The theme can be explicitly stated or implied. .

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FICTIONAL NARRATIVE WRITING RUBRIC 4 3 2 1 1 Organization
FICTIONAL NARRATIVE WRITING RUBRIC 4 3 2 1 1 The plot is thoroughly Plot is adequately The plot is minimally The story lacks a developed Organization: developed. The story is developed. The story has developed. The story plot line. It is missing either a interesting and logically a clear beginning, middle does not have a clear beginning or an end. The organized: there is clear and end. The story is beginning, middle, and relationship between the exposition, rising action and arranged in logical order. end. The sequence of events is often confusing. climax. The story has a clear events is sometimes resolution or surprise confusing and may be ending. hard to follow. 2 The setting is clearly The setting is clearly The setting is identified The setting may be vague or Elements of Story: described through vivid identified with some but not clearly described. hard to identify. Setting sensory language. sensory language. It has minimal sensory language. 3 Major characters are well Major and minor Characters are minimally Main characters are lacking Elements of Story: developed through dialogue, characters are somewhat developed. They are development. They are Characters actions, and thoughts. Main developed through described rather than described rather than characters change or grow dialogue, actions, and established through established. They lack during the story. thoughts. Main dialogue, actions and individuality and do not change characters change or thoughts. They show little throughout the story. grow during the story. growth or change during the story. 4 All dialogue sounds realistic Most dialogue sounds Some dialogue sounds Dialogue may be nonexistent, Elements of Story: and advances the plot.
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The Character of Huckleberry Finn
Forthcoming in Philosophy and Literature 2017 Gehrman The Character of Huckleberry Finn Kristina Gehrman University of Tennessee, Knoxville ABSTRACT: Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is morally admirable because he follows his heart and does the right thing in a pinch. Or is he? The Character of Huckleberry Finn argues that the standard reading of Huck woefully misunderstands his literary and moral character. The real Huck is strikingly morally passive and thoroughly unreliable, and when the pinch comes, he fails Jim completely. His true character emerges when, with Iris Murdoch’s “justice and love”, we attend to Huck’s youth and his history of unmitigated abuse and neglect. Huck’s case reveals how (and how much) developmental and experiential history matter to moral character. I. Ever since Jonathan Bennett wrote about Huckleberry Finn’s conscience in 1974, Mark Twain’s young hero has played a small but noteworthy role in the moral philosophy and moral psychology literature. Following Bennett, philosophers read Huck as someone who consistently follows his heart and does the right thing in a pinch, firmly believing all the while that what he does is morally wrong.1 Specifically, according to this reading, Huck has racist beliefs that he never consciously questions; but in practice he consistently defies those beliefs to do the right thing in the context of his relationship with his Black companion, Jim. Because of this, Huck is morally admirable, but unusual. Perhaps he is an “inverse akratic,” as Nomy Arpaly and Timothy Schroeder have proposed; or perhaps, as Bennett argued, Huck’s oddness reveals the central and primary role of the sentiments (as opposed to principle) in moral action.2 But the standard philosophical reading of Huckleberry Finn seriously misunderstands his 1 Forthcoming in Philosophy and Literature 2017 Gehrman character (in both the moral/personal and the literary sense of the word), because it does not take into account the historically contingent, developmental nature of persons and their character traits.
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AP English Literature Required Reading
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Create a Character: Acting & Language Arts with Caren Graham
Create A Character: Acting & Language Arts With Caren Graham ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS LEARNING TARGETS ● How do actors create a character? ● I can make creative choices with my voice and body ● How can characters I discover in other disciplines like to invent a variety of characters history, fairy tales, or literature come to life in ● I can create other forms of dramatic writing or drama? analyze a recording of myself performing MATERIALS NEEDED: Paper and Pencil DIGITAL SUPPORT RESOURCES: <link> INSTRUCTIONS 1. Choose a character from a favorite book. Examples: Harry Potter or Hermione Granger. 2. With pencil and paper write down 3 sentences to describe your chosen character. 3. Use descriptive words like tall, lanky, bent over. 4. Add personality traits like brave, scary, quick witted, confident. 5. Now use your imagination to create a character statue which is a frozen moment in time in a posed position. Start with your face. Try making a “brave” facial expression! a. Is there a moment in Harry Potter, when Harry or Hermione felt clever or brave? Write it down. b. Create that moment in a character statue and then come to life. c. Try to exaggerate (make bigger) a personality trait: for instance brave, and then switch to another feeling or trait like scared. 6. Now add a gesture (an expressive movement) to go with that character trait! a. Move your whole body with expression, posture and gesture. Try saying something in the manner your character might speak with the gesture. b. Acting like the character, did it feel better to be brave or scared? Why? 7.
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Fiction As Research Practice: Short Stories, Novellas, and Novels
Alberta Journal of Educational Research, Vol. 62.1, Spring 2016, 130-133 Book Review Fiction as Research Practice: Short Stories, Novellas, and Novels Patricia Leavy Walnut, CA: Left Coast Press Inc., 2013 Reviewed by: Frances Kalu University of Calgary Fiction as Research Practice: Short Stories, Novellas, and Novels introduces the reader to fiction-based research. In the first section, Patricia Leavy explores the genre by explaining its background and possibilities and goes on to describe how to conduct and evaluate fiction-based research. In the second section of the book, she presents and evaluates examples of fiction-based research in different forms including short stories and excerpts from novellas and novels written by different authors. The third and final section explains how fiction and fiction-based research can be used in teaching. Leavy clearly differentiates the term fiction-based research from arts- based research in order to project the emergent field in a clear light of its own. Babbie (2001) explains that just as qualitative research practice emerged as a means of explaining phenomena that could not be captured by quantitative scientific research, social research attempts to study and understand everyday life experiences. Within social research, arts-based research tries to represent phenomena studied aesthetically through various forms of art (Barone & Eisner, 2012). As a form of arts-based research, Leavy describes fiction-based research as a great way to explore “topics that can be difficult to approach” through fiction (p. 20). Topics include the intricacies of interactions in everyday life, race relations, and socio-economic class and its effects on human life.
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The Structure of Plays
n the previous chapters, you explored activities preparing you to inter- I pret and develop a role from a playwright’s script. You used imagina- tion, concentration, observation, sensory recall, and movement to become aware of your personal resources. You used vocal exercises to prepare your voice for creative vocal expression. Improvisation and characterization activities provided opportunities for you to explore simple character portrayal and plot development. All of these activities were preparatory techniques for acting. Now you are ready to bring a character from the written page to the stage. The Structure of Plays LESSON OBJECTIVES ◆ Understand the dramatic structure of a play. 1 ◆ Recognize several types of plays. ◆ Understand how a play is organized. Much of an actor’s time is spent working from materials written by playwrights. You have probably read plays in your language arts classes. Thus, you probably already know that a play is a story written in dia- s a class, play a short logue form to be acted out by actors before a live audience as if it were A game of charades. Use the titles of plays and musicals or real life. the names of famous actors. Other forms of literature, such as short stories and novels, are writ- ten in prose form and are not intended to be acted out. Poetry also dif- fers from plays in that poetry is arranged in lines and verses and is not written to be performed. ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ These students are bringing literature to life in much the same way that Aristotle first described drama over 2,000 years ago.
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LoriScot Goodson Smith & Jim Blasingame The Death of Genre: Why the Best YA Fiction Often Defies Classification few years ago, I received a phone call from a adding a list called genre-busters, novels which do not desperate sixth grade reading teacher. “Help!” easily fit into a single category. The more I think about Ashe cried, “I have a literary mutiny on my my YA favorite titles of the past few years, the more hands. I need your help now!!” I immediately raced bewildered I become. Zusak’s The Book Thief— upstairs. historical fiction or fantasy? Anderson’s The Astonish- Our sixth graders read Louis Sachar’s Holes as a ing Life of Octavian Nothing—historical fiction or required novel. The teacher uses Holes as part of her science fiction? Rosoff’s How I Live Now?—realistic unit on fantasy. In a time where many middle fiction or science fiction? Shusterman’s The Schwa schoolers are steeped in Harry Potter and Paolini, Was Here—realistic fiction or fantasy? I have come to Holes just did not seem to fit into that the same the realization that genre might be dead, that many of category of fantasy. recently published YA novels no longer fit into the “Mr. Smith,” they argued, “It can’t be fantasy. It’s predictable categories we typically designate for too real.” books. Is it time to despair? I think not. Rather, let us What followed was a long discussion about the celebrate the innovative fashion in which today’s YA different types of fantasy. We debated over the effects authors are bending the traditional definitions of of rattlesnake nail polish, the existence of yellow genre.
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Introduction: Ethics of the Narrative
doi: https://doi.org/10.26262/exna.v1i1.5990 Introduction: Ethics of the Narrative Helena Maragou a, Theodora Tsimpouki b aDeree—The American College of Greece. b The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. If a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world. 1 The debate on whether literature does or should possess ethical relevance is both old and new. As far back as in the ancient times, Plato and Aristotle addressed the ways in which aesthetic structure produces affective power, as well as the extent to which the affective power of literature may provide direction, or in fact—as in the case of Plato’s famous critique of poetry—misdirection to an audience’s moral consciousness. In more recent years, in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, the intersections of literature and ethics became the focus of work by Wayne C. Booth,2 who theorized on the moral functioning of rhetorical practices, and Martha C. Nussbaum,3 who addressed literature from the perspective of moral philosophy. In an article published in the 2004 special issue of Poetics Today, which focused on Ethics and Literature, Michael Eskin4 draws attention to moral philosophy’s “turn to literature,” a move that aims to embed moral philosophy’s abstract investigations into the concrete domain of human and social relations opened up by literature. At the same time, however, philosophy’s turn toward literature has coincided with a turn of literary studies toward ethics,5 a fact which some attribute to a reaction against formalism and poststructuralism.
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Glossary of Critical Terms for Prose Adapted from “LitWeb,” The Norton Introduction to Literature Study Space http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/litweb10/glossary/C.aspx Action Any event or series of events depicted in a literary work; an event may be verbal as well as physical, so that speaking or telling a story within the story may be an event. Allusion A brief, often implicit and indirect reference within a literary text to something outside the text, whether another text (e.g. the Bible, a myth, another literary work, a painting, or a piece of music) or any imaginary or historical person, place, or thing. Ambiguity When we are involved in interpretation—figuring out what different elements in a story “mean”—we are responding to a work’s ambiguity. This means that the work is open to several simultaneous interpretations. Language, especially when manipulated artistically, can communicate more than one meaning, encouraging our interpretations. Antagonist A character or a nonhuman force that opposes, or is in conflict with, the protagonist. Anticlimax An event or series of events usually at the end of a narrative that contrast with the tension building up before. Antihero A protagonist who is in one way or another the very opposite of a traditional hero. Instead of being courageous and determined, for instance, an antihero might be timid, hypersensitive, and indecisive to the point of paralysis. Antiheroes are especially common in modern literary works. Archetype A character, ritual, symbol, or plot pattern that recurs in the myth and literature of many cultures; examples include the scapegoat or trickster (character type), the rite of passage (ritual), and the quest or descent into the underworld (plot pattern).
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Great Historical Fiction Books at the Pleasanton Public Library
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Narrative, Identity and Academic Storytelling Narrations, Identités Et Récits Académiques
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LITERATURE (LITR) This Course Studies the Form of the Short Story in the Literature of Great Britain, the United States, and Other Nations
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