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“Conveniency to Nature”: Literary Art and Arbitrariness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Charles Eric Reeves
Charles Eric Reeves*
Affiliation:
Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts
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Abstract

Despite its prominence in many critical lexicons, the term “literary convention” rarely receives sustained theoretical scrutiny. Rather, it has served interpreters, and even theorists, as a kind of general-purpose catchall, loosely synonymous with “custom,” “habit,” “assumption,” “myth,” “cliché,” “fiction,” or the French convenance. I argue that a philosophically rigorous definition of social convention may work heuristically to clarify what literary convention means and how it functions within a larger poetics. In particular, an intelligible notion of literary convention will help clarify the dialectical relation of mimesis and semiosis—what derives from the “natural” world and what results from an internal economy of parts and whole.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 101 , Issue 5 , October 1986 , pp. 798 - 810
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1986

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