Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: : This essay considers the micro-genre of the “heiress narrative” in Alice Munro’s “Corrie” and Henry James’s Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady . It argues that both writers use the formal technique of “foreshortening,” a term James borrowed from the pictorial arts, as a means of conjuring a sense of character dimensionality that also serves as a vector of social critique. Both employ foreshortening to create a characterological depth-effect that is pitched against a male-dominated consumer culture that operates according to its own reductionist logic, constructing women as mere instruments of wealth accumulation.
Source: Modern fiction studies
Author: Allen MacDuffie
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4417270686
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