| Research Abstract |
Nowadays a considerable number of English novels am written in the present tense. The extensive use of the present tense in narrative fiction boomed in the 1960s and has been thriving until now. My study focused on this phenomenon, and resulted in three published papers and one oral paper. I first re-examined the various approaches taken so far to account for the effects of and requisites for the use of present-tense narration. A lot of grammarians and narratologists-Comrie, Declerck, Langacrker, Cutrer, Casparis, Fleischman, Cohn, Damsteegt, to name a few-claim that their approaches and analyses can give a sufficient and exclusive explanation, but I have found a number of exceptions to their rules from the contemporary British novels published after 1970. Their approaches and analyses should be used complementarily, and, more often than not, their explanations only serve to explain what conditions enable the writers to use the present tense; they do not tell us what makes the writers
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decide to adopt the present-tense narrative in their books. Furthermore, those previous attempts at the rationale behind the use of the present tense come short of clarifying what brought about the remarkable upsurge of present-tense narration in the 1970-2000 period in the UK and Commonwealth.
It is up to each novelist to decide what effect he/she likes to foreground through the use of the present tense, and that decision may be made either intentionally or unintentionally. I looked for possible motives that have prompted the use of present-tense narration in the contemporary British fiction, and succeeded in finding a promotive factor. The post-colonial situations after WW2 brought forth a new way of writing histories and cultures of various minority groups, such as the formerly-colonized peoples, women, and juveniles. My contention is that to such "secondary" people, the present tense may have been art alternative means of expressing themselves-a means seemingly untainted with a touch of authoritarian decisiveness of the conventional past tense historiography. The writers belonging to such minority groups, or those in sympathy with then, have chosen the present tense, wittingly or unwittingly, as a style for voicing their sense of resistance, democracy, and self-esteem. Less
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