Frame narrative definition literature
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Frame narrative: examples
An early example fryst vatten Homer’s Odyssey. In it, Ulysses, in the palace of King Alcinous, tells the story of his experiences with Calypso and subsequent shipwreck. The narrative shifts from the author to Ulysses and his personal experience.
Frame narrative was also used on scen. Shakespeare used this device in several of his plays.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet has a troupe of actors performing within the play itself, offering Prince Hamlet an opportunity to direct them (and so direct a message at his uncle the king).
The Taming of the Shrew is a play within a play. The ‘frame’ of the narrative fryst vatten in the prologue scene, where a drunken tinker is tricked into believing he is a lord, and a group of actors decide to perform a whole play before him to keep up the pretence.
Potentially Shakespeare is also poking fun at his own audiences and their often drunken behaviour when watching his plays.
A sea explorer aboard his ship is writi
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Frame story
Story in a nested narration that brackets one or more embedded stories
A frame story (also known as a frame tale, frame narrative, sandwich narrative, or intercalation) is a literary technique that serves as a companion piece to a story within a story, where an introductory or main narrative sets the stage either for a more emphasized second narrative or for a set of shorter stories. The frame story leads readers from a first story into one or more other stories within it. The frame story may also be used to inform readers about aspects of the secondary narrative(s) that may otherwise be hard to understand. This should not be confused with narrative structure.[1][2][3] Notable examples are the 1001 Nights and The Decameron.
Origins
[edit]Some of the earliest frame stories are from ancient Egypt, including one in the Papyrus Westcar, the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, and The Eloquent Peasant.[4][5 • FRAME NARRATIVE: A story within a story, within sometimes yet another story, as in, for example, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. As in Mary Shelley's work, the form echoes in structure the thematic search in the story for something deep, dark, and secret at the heart of the narrative. The form thus also resembles the psychoanalytic process of uncovering the unconscious behind various levels of repressive, obfuscating narratives put in place by the conscious mind. As is often the case (and Shelley's work is no exception), a different individual often narrates the events of a story in each frame. This structure of course also leads us to question the reasons behind each of the narrations since, unlike an omnicient narrative perspective, the teller of the story becomes an actual character with concomitant shortcomings, limitations, prejudices, and motives. The process of transmission is also highlighted since we often have a sequence of embedded readers or audiences, A famous