Openings: Narrative Beginnings from the Epic to the Novel

by A.D. Nuttall

What is the difference between a natural beginning and the beginning of a story? Some deny that there are any beginnings in nature, except perhaps for the origin of the universe itself, suggesting that elsewhere there is only a continuum of events, into which beginnings are variously "read" by different societies. This book argues that history is full of real beginnings but that poets and novelists are indeed free to begin their stories wherever they choose. The ancient poet Homer laid down a rule for his successors when he began his epic by plunging in media res , "into the midst of things." Later writers, however, persistently play off the natural Genesis or the birth of a child. Meanwhile, the inspiring Muse of epic gives way to the poet's ego, dies, revives, and dies again.

Hardcover

First published May 14, 1992

About the author

Anthony David Nuttall was an English literary critic and academic.

Nuttall was educated at Hereford Cathedral School, Watford Grammar School for Boys and Merton College, Oxford, where he studied both Classical Moderations and English Literature. As a postgraduate he wrote a B.Litt thesis on Shakespeare's The Tempest subsequently published as Two Concepts of Allegory (1968), and considered by some to be his most original book. Nuttall first taught at Sussex University where he was successively Lecturer, Reader and Professor of English and where his students included the philosopher A.C. Grayling and the critic and biographer Robert Fraser. After a tumultuous period as Pro-Vice-Chancellor at Sussex, he moved on to New College, Oxford in 1984, eventually being elected to an Oxford chair.

His published works include studies of Shakespeare and works on the connections between philosophy and literature. Prominent among the first is Shakespeare the Thinker (2007), in which he examines the philosophical issues implicit in Shakespeare's plays, and among the second A Common Sky in which he follows through the literary repercussions of the English empiricist tradition and of the idea of solipcism. His work is characterised throughout by wide reading (especially in classical sources), common sense, a deep and broad humanity, a robust sense of humour and by occasional - and sometimes eccentric - references to popular culture (In Shakespeare the Thinker, for example, he cites the TV series "Wife Swap".) His brother Jeff Nuttall was a poet and an important figure in 1960s counterculture. To him he dedicated his book The Alternative Trinity, a study of the Gnostic tradition in English literature through Marlowe and Milton to William Blake, a poet to whom both brothers had been attracted in their youth, if in rather different ways.

From Wikipedia.

Obituaries:
The Times (UK) Online, The Guardian (UK) Online.