The articles with which David Lodge entertained and enlightened readers of the
Independent on Sundayand
The Washington Postare now revised, expanded and collected together in book form.
The art of fiction is considered under a wide range of headings, such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Time-shift, Magical Realism and Symbolism, and each topic is illustrated by a passage or two taken from classic or modern fiction. Drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James and Martin Amis, Jane Austen and Fay Weldon and Henry Fielding and James Joyce, David Lodge makes accessible to the general reader the richness and variety of British and American fiction. Technical terms, such as Interior Monologue, Metafiction, Intertextuality and the Unreliable Narrator, are lucidly explained and their application demonstrated.
Bringing to criticism the verve and humour of his own novels, David Lodge has provided essential reading for students of literature, aspirant writers, and anyone who wishes to understand how literature works.
The Art of Fiction - David Lodge Preface
1. Beginning (Jane Austen, Ford Madox Ford)
2. The Intrusive Author (George Eliot, E. M. Forster)
3. Suspense (Thomas Hardy)
4. Teenage
Skaz(J.D. Salinger)
5. The Epistolary Novel (Michael Frayn)
6. Point of View (Henry James)
7. Mystery (Rudyard Kipling)
8. Names (David Lodge, Paul Auster)
9. The Stream of Consciousness (Virginia Woolf)
10. Interior Monologue (James Joyce)
11. Defamiliarization (Charlotte Brontë
12. The Sense of Place (Martin Amis)
13. Lists (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
14. Introducing a Character (Christopher Isherwood)
15. Surprise (William Makepeace Thackeray)
16. Time-Shift (Muriel Spark)
17. The Reader in the Text (Laurence Sterne)
18. Weather (Jane Austen, Charles Dickens)
19. Repetition (Ernest Hemingway)
20. Fancy Prose (Vladimir Nabokov)
21. Intertextuality (Joseph Conrad)
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