Literature
Beginning a narrative in medias res (Latin: "into the middle of things") began in ancient times as an oral tradition and was established as a convention of epic poetry with Homer's Iliad in the 8th century BC. The technique of narrating most of the story in flashback also dates back to the Indian epic, the Mahabharata, around the 5th century BC. Several medieval Arabian Nights tales such as "Sinbad the Sailor", "The City of Brass" and "The Three Apples" also had nonlinear narratives employing the in medias res and flashback techniques.
From the late 19th century and early 20th century, modernist novelists Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner experimented with narrative chronology and abandoning linear order.
Examples of nonlinear novels are: Luís Vaz de Camões's The Lusiads, Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67), Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (ca. 1833), Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847), James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), Sadeq Hedayat's The Blind Owl (1937), William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959), Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961), Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Milorad Pavić's Dictionary of the Khazars (1988), Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting (1993), Carole Maso's Ava: a novel (1993) and Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato (1979).
Scott McCloud argues in Understanding Comics that the narration of comics is nonlinear because it relies on the reader's choices and interactions.
Read more about this topic: Nonlinear Narrative
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the “wrong crowd” read like tornado alerts in parent manuals. . . . It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren’t planning to get a Ph.D. from Yale.”
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“Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.”
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“The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn’t make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.”
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