“Fashioning” the Maltese family

Abstract

Literature does not provide a mirror of society and does not pretend to do so either. But it does allow writers to explore the individuals and the community they choose to write about and their work often provides insights one would associate with qualitative research. Literature is essentially a “fashioning of language,” a “kind of aesthetic ‘forming’ [...] or ‘shaping’. The genre of fiction in particular is “characterised by a more overtly referential modality in purporting to relate to ‘real life,’” and this is because it “seems to form or shape the raw material of lived experience into the ‘world of the book.’” Art fashions “a perceptible reality for us in its textual ‘shaping’ of the inchoate into comprehensible designs or patterns.”