Knowra Psychological Fiction Psychological Fiction Psychological fiction emphasizes characters’ thoughts, emotions, motives, and inner conflicts, often making subjective experience central to plot and narration.
Stream of Consciousness : A narrative technique that represents the continuous flow of a character’s thoughts and sensations. It places the reader inside unfolding thought rather than presenting only outward action.
Characterization : The ways a story establishes a character’s traits, motives, and development. Psychological fiction makes characterization depend heavily on inferred mental life.
Samuel Richardson : An eighteenth-century English novelist known for epistolary novels including Pamela and Clarissa. His letters make emotion, self-scrutiny, and moral choice central to narrative.
Crime and Punishment : Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel about Raskolnikov, a former student who commits murder and confronts its consequences. Raskolnikov’s rationalizations and guilt drive the plot as much as the crime.
Adventure Fiction : Fiction organized around dangerous journeys, exploits, and external challenges. Its emphasis on outward events contrasts with plots driven by inward struggle.
Free Indirect Discourse : A narrative mode that blends a character’s idiom and viewpoint with third-person narration. It conveys a character’s perspective without explicit thought tags or first-person narration.
Motivation : The reasons, needs, or desires that prompt a person or character to act. Competing motives often generate its central conflicts.
Clarissa : Samuel Richardson’s 1748 novel about a young woman resisting her family’s coercive plans. Its letters build an extended account of conflicting motives and emotional pressure.
Mrs Dalloway : Virginia Woolf’s novel following Clarissa Dalloway through one day in postwar London. Its shifts among memories and consciousnesses make interior time shape the day’s events.
Action Fiction : Fiction centered on physical conflict, rapid events, and high-stakes external goals. Psychological fiction can make hesitation and interpretation more consequential than action.
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