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The City Dweller´s Distrust of Folk. The Narrative Figure
Jedličková, Alice
This paper focuses on a strategy used to represent rural people, or “simple folk,” in narratives whose goal is to motivate readers to reassess their own attitudes towards the folk. The authorial intent of such works draws from the idea that traditional values are not appreciated and therefore must be discovered and protected (e.g., language, the past, the rural folk). Urban dwellers’ prejudiced perception of the countryside represented in such narratives can be simply formulated through contrasting images: for example, the progress, education, and conveniences offered by the city versus the backwardness, ignorance, and poverty of the countryside. This strategy is based on the distrustful or dismissive views of city people towards the folk as implicitly voiced by the narrator or by a specific character in the narrative. In contrast, we also find rather explicit counterarguments against these views in the speech of the narrator or in the speech, actions, and behaviors of the characters. In rural-themed prose from the 1850s through the 1870s, the subject matter of this study, this constellation of ideas and opposing ideas is regularly reflected in both the story and the narrative discourse and forms a stable narrative device, which substantially contributes to forming the narrative point-of-view and its effectiveness in persuading readers. In some works, this narrative device permeates the entire text and affects its genre - in Božena Němcová’s short story “Poor Folk” the “slice of life” genre intertwines with the genre of argument: every situation presented is in some regards an argument against the previously established idea that “city people distrust the folk.”

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