Unit 3 - Fiction & Short Story
UGC NET English Paper 2 Complete Study Material
📚 This comprehensive unit covers the development of fiction from early novels to postmodern works, including major authors, narrative techniques, critical approaches, and analytical methods essential for UGC NET English Paper 2 preparation.
Picaresque novels, Epistolary fiction, Early novelists (Defoe, Richardson, Fielding), Gothic fiction (Walpole, Radcliffe), and Sentimental novels (Sterne).
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." - Austen
Key Concepts: Novel vs Romance, Epistolary form, Picaresque tradition, Sentimentalism
Study Early FictionSocial problem novels (Dickens, Gaskell), Realism (Eliot, Trollope), Sensation fiction (Collins), and Late Victorian (Hardy, Stevenson).
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." - Tolstoy
Key Concepts: Omniscient narrator, Bildungsroman, Industrial novel, Serial publication
Master VictoriansStream of consciousness (Woolf, Joyce), Psychological fiction (Lawrence), Experimental forms (Faulkner, Kafka), and High modernism (Proust).
"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." - Woolf
Key Concepts: Stream of consciousness, Interior monologue, Epiphany, Fragmentation
Explore ModernismMetafiction (Barth, Nabokov), Magical realism (García Márquez), Historiographic metafiction (Rushdie), and Minimalism (Carver).
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." - García Márquez
Key Concepts: Metafiction, Pastiche, Hyperreality, Intertextuality
Study PostmodernismCommonwealth literature (Naipaul, Achebe), Subaltern narratives (Roy), Diasporic writing (Rushdie), and Decolonizing literature (Ngũgĩ).
"The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." - Naipaul
Key Concepts: Hybridity, Othering, Mimicry, Subaltern
Analyze PostcolonialEarly pioneers (Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand), Post-independence (Narayan, Desai), Contemporary voices (Roy, Adiga), and Regional narratives.
"The morning sun was still low in the sky when Ammu came home." - Roy
Key Concepts: Indigenization, Nation and narration, Caste narratives, Feminist voices
Explore Indian FictionEarly masters (Poe, Chekhov), Modernist stories (Joyce, Mansfield), Postcolonial stories (Borges, Lahiri), and Experimental forms.
"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect." - Kafka
Key Concepts: Epiphany, Economy of form, Twist endings, Minimalism
Study Short StoriesFormalism (Shklovsky), Structuralism (Barthes), Narratology (Genette), Poststructuralism (Derrida), and Feminist narratology (Warhol).
"The death of the author is the birth of the reader." - Barthes
Key Concepts: Fabula vs Syuzhet, Focalization, Diegesis, Unreliable narrator
Learn Narrative TheoryPoint of view, Characterization, Plot structures, Setting, Dialogue, Symbolism, and Experimental techniques.
"You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter." - Twain
Key Concepts: Unreliable narrator, Stream of consciousness, Frame narrative, Leitmotif
Master TechniquesMarxist criticism, Feminist criticism, Psychoanalytic approaches, Postcolonial theory, and Reader-response criticism.
"The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind." - Freud
Key Concepts: Ideological state apparatus, Gaze theory, Orientalism, Heteroglossia
Explore CriticismFiction Analysis Practice
Identify the Narrative Technique
"He walked into the room, noticing the dust motes dancing in the sunlight, while his mind wandered back to that summer in Cornwall when everything had changed."
Match the Author to the Work
Literary Period Identification
Which literary movement does this excerpt represent?
"The clock struck thirteen. Winston Smith pushed open the door of his flat, trying to escape the ever-watchful eyes of the telescreen."
🚨 UGC NET FICTION ALERT!
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