Emphasis Recruited: Phrases as Repeating Frequency (nN/1S) in Selected Nineteenth-century British Fictions

Abstract

Repetition in fiction is a very common device that many authors employ to bring forth motifs and themes into their works or as a means of creating emphasis. Therefore, it is quite expectable to observe many works with repeated sentences, phrases, and even words in various periods, which either are repetitions of a character’s own words or the repetitions of a character’s utterances by another character in the narrative in a small scale and the repetition of the whole work in larger scale. Through the use of Genettian repeating frequency type (nN/1S), authors are able to stress particular events, provide themes and motifs, and make use of prior narration, simultaneously. By means of scrutiny of repetitions in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, and Charles Dickens’ Hard Times as three canonical works of British literature through Genettian nN/1S frequency type, this study could elaborate on the crucial emphatic role this frequency type plays in emergence of specific effects in these narratives.

Keywords

• narrative
• repeating frequency
• emphatic function
• repetition