Fiction in the present tense

A notable feature of twentieth and now twenty-first century fiction has been the increasing tendency for either large parts of novels, or entire novels, to be narrated in the present tense. This practice, which, initially especially, was associated with avant-garde fiction, diverges significantly from the tendency of twentieth-century literary theory to identify the past or preterite tense as the essential tense of narrative. In more popular fiction, the use of the present tense remains controversial, though it is also true that occasional use of the present tense has been a regular recourse not only of fiction but of narrative verse from earliest times. The article notes the dominant role of the present tense in lyric verse, and also the widespread use of the present tense in contemporary journalism and in the media - in the linguistic environment within which fiction is written. Often present-tense writing places a special emphasis on visuality, at once stressing and slowing narrative movement - an emphasis that is sometimes at least related to the development of die cinema. The article closes by considering some broader social, cultural, and also emotional, corollaries of present-tense writing.