For example, the evergreen dialogue of aunt Ada Doom’s ‘ I saw something nasty in the woodshed’ creates leverage across the whole storyline as the suspense behind what she saw confines the whole family into the rural village for years and years.
The book also tackles the genre of suspense quite interestingly. She utilizes imitating and parodying as a tool for mocking the unconventional social values and customs, henceforth, hilarity as much as futurism, becomes a distancing ploy throughout the plot of the story. Moreover, Gibbon’s effort of mocking countryside romantic novels is an example of a modernistic approach in her book. Therefore, she decides to give them a wake-up call and introduce them to a futuristic world.
The concept of futurism is seen in this book when Flora visits the rural area where her relatives live and realizes how backward their lives are.
The reader of the book finds himself indulged in the un-real imaginary bubble created by the author yet at the same time finds himself comparing and contrasting it to the real practical world. The narrative text that she uses in her novel is future-oriented in the way that the imaginary and fictional world that she creates is not perfect but quite different from the real world that we live in. An example of this could be seen in the parodic mentioning of fictitious Anglo-Nicaraguan War of 1946 in the novel. Gibbons uses several modernist themes and tropes in her work of art novel Cold Comfort Farm. This is also true for the story characters as well, where the author evaluates the characters and carves their personas individually as the storyline progresses. It rather allows them to critically evaluate the characters and the various circumstances presented in the scenes and make a compos mentis decision (“Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative | Mieke Bal | download,” n.d.). The distancing effect in the literature is known to prevent the audiences to completely diminishing their consciousness and blindly following the storyline wherever it takes. Gibbons has used the “distancing effect” in her novel as the background of her writing narrative. Throughout her life, she remained true to English literature and published about twenty-three novels and a bunch of poetic pieces and short stories (Hammill, 2001). Her highly famous novel was later converted into a star-studded film as well. The most celebrated line of her novel ‘I saw something nasty in the woodshed’ has become a catchline till date. Her work of literature was highly proclaimed as she first published her debut novel “ Cold Comfort Farm”. Stella Gibbons (1902-1989) was a journalist turned novelist in the era of 1920s.
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