Frank Norris: Spatial Form and Narrative Time

Frank Norris: Spatial Form and Narrative Time offers a unique and illuminating examination of American naturalist Frank Norris. Norris’s theories,evident in both his fiction and his critical writings, reflect his keen awareness of the relationship of time and space within literature. This work identifies spatial elements within Norris’s fiction and determines how Norris, deeply influenced by both his early training as an artist and by Impressionism, employs these elements as primary structural devices to counter the linearity of his narrative. Employing mainstream critical theory, Frank Norris: Spatial Form and Narrative Time establishesr for the first time how Norris’s use of spatial form, particularly his use of Impressionism, looks toward modernism and contributes to spatial form in literature in general.