My Science School

A narrative may be an entire novel or a simple short story. Some narratives are divided into interrelated groups like the Canterbury Tales. Some narratives are larger and made up of both prose and poetic interludes; an example of this type of narrative is The Cremation of Sam McGee.

Many narrative poems are performance pieces. They hold oral traditions in which poetry was used as a way of memorization. The meter, alliteration, and kennings helps bards better remember the stories which were used to tell of traditions, the happiness of life, and life's deepest troubles.

There are four types of narrative verse:

Ballad

A poem similar to a folk tale which uses a repeated refrain. This means that every few stanzas a portion of the poem is repeated, much like a song.

Epic

A long, serious poem which tells the story of a hero. Think of stories like Odyssey or Ben-Hur.

Idyll

A poem about either an idolized country scene or about the heroes of yesteryear. This could also include the story of Odyssey, except for different reasons. An idyll speaks of someone or something in a way that it should be idolized. For example, today many stories of Ghandi or Martin Luther King, Jr. could be written about in an idyll. However, an even better example could be George Washington.

Lay

A long poem which was sung by medieval minstrels. The long poems generally were about the news of the day or historical facts they wished to be passed along throughout the countryside.

Credit : Poem of Quotes

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A manuscript was, traditionally, any document written by hand – or, once practical typewriters became available, typewritten – as opposed to mechanically printed or reproduced in some indirect or automated way.

The study of the writing in surviving manuscripts, the "hand", is termed palaeography (or paleography). The traditional abbreviations are MS for manuscript and MSS for manuscripts, while the forms MS., ms or ms. for singular, and MSS., mss or mss. for plural (with or without the full stop, all uppercase or all lowercase) are also accepted. The second s is not simply the plural; by an old convention, a doubling of the last letter of the abbreviation expresses the plural, just as pp. means "pages".

A manuscript may be a codex (i.e. bound as a book) or a scroll. Illuminated manuscripts are enriched with pictures, border decorations, elaborately embossed initial letters or full-page illustrations.

Most surviving pre-modern manuscripts use the codex format (as in a modern book), which had replaced the scroll by Late Antiquity. Parchment or vellum, as the best type of parchment is known, had also replaced papyrus, which was not nearly so long lived and has survived to the present only in the extremely dry conditions of Egypt, although it was widely used across the Roman world. Parchment is made of animal skin, normally calf, sheep, or goat, but also other animals. With all skins, the quality of the finished product is based on how much preparation and skill was put into turning the skin into parchment. Parchment made from calf or sheep was the most common in Northern Europe, while civilizations in Southern Europe preferred goatskin. Often, if the parchment is white or cream in color and veins from the animal can still be seen, it is calfskin. If it is yellow, greasy or in some cases shiny, then it was made from sheepskin.

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Fanfiction is a genre of amateur fiction writing that takes as its basis a “canon” of “original” material.

This original material is most often popular books, television shows and movies – but can expand to almost anything, from the lives of celebrities to the travels of inanimate objects like the Mars rover.

The main impulse behind fanfiction has always been a playful desire to engage with original works. Yet authors are still subject to modern copyright laws. In Australia, the US and the EU, copyright exists for the lifetime of the author plus seventy years.

Many early Disney film adaptations were derivative works based on out-of-copyright novels – think Alice in Wonderland (1951) and The Jungle Book (1967). In a way this could be considered a form of fanfiction.

Today, existing restrictions mean those interested in “remixing” copyrighted material create online communities to discuss and distribute their work freely. One of the aims of the fan-led Organisation of Transformative Works is to fight for the validity of fair use laws.

Still, the amateur status copyright law forces on fanworks is one of the reasons fanfiction as a whole is regarded with some derision.

This is one reason why the Twilight fanfiction origins of 50 Shades of Grey were obscured. Due to residual textual and thematic similarities, the question of copyright infringement remains open.

Credit : The Conversation

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The Mortal Instruments is a series of six young adult fantasy novels written by American author Cassandra Clare, the last of which was published on May 27, 2014. The Mortal Instruments is chronologically the third series of a planned five in The Shadowhunter Chronicles but was the first one published. It follows Clarissa Fray, who interacts with a group of Nephilim known as Shadowhunters while also discovering her own heritage and her family history. The Shadowhunters protect the world of mundane/human people, who are also called mundanes or "mundies", from dark forces beyond their world.

In City of Ashes, the Faerie Realm and its inhabitants are characters from Holly Black's faerie series, beginning with Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale. Also, the characters Val and Luis from Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie appear in another scene in that book. Within Holly Black's third book, Ironside: A Modern Faery's Tale, there is a reference to the Mortal Cup mentioned in the Mortal Instruments series.

Clare delved deeply into world mythology in order to build the Shadowhunter world featured in The Mortal Instruments, The Infernal Devices, and all other offshoots of the series. There are strong influences from Paradise Lost and The Inferno; while there are many references to Western religious mythology, Clare also studied world mythology deeply, specifically demonic myth featured in Japanese, Tibetan, and other Eastern cultural texts. Her references to angels and nephilim throughout the series also come from this study of world religions and folklore. These myths were then adapted to fit into her stories.

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