Literary fragment

Byzantine Egyptian papyrus fragment

A literary fragment is a piece of text that may be part of a larger work, or that employs a 'fragmentary' form characterised by physical features such as short paragraphs or sentences separated by white space, and thematic features such as discontinuity, ambivalence, ambiguity, or lack of a traditional narrative structure.[1][2]

While it is difficult to classify literary fragments, a number of critics agree on a basic taxonomy of two types of fragment: those who intentionally use fragmentation as a form in their writing, and those that are fragmented because they are incomplete or because parts have been lost over time.[1]

As a form, the literary fragment has been employed during the Romantic, Modernist, Postmodern and Contemporary literary periods as a way to reckon with the challenges of modernity.[1]

  1. ^ a b c Guignery, Vanessa; Drag, Wojciech Drag (2019). The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction. Delaware: Vernon Press. pp. xvii.
  2. ^ Jovanovic, Evelina Saponjic (2019-12-22). "Fragment as a Storytelling Device". Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics. 42 (3): 125–140.