The Art of Fiction

Description

In this entertaining and enlightening collection David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce. Looking at ideas such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and illustrating each topic with a passage taken from a classic or modern novel, David Lodge makes the richness and variety of British and American fiction accessible to the general reader.

He provides essential reading for students, aspiring writers and anyone who wants to understand how fiction works.Exciting…a book for starting up trains of thought or discussion… It did make me think, as a writer, as a reader, as a teacher—AS Byatt, Sunday Times

Here is scholarship made human… There has been no better populist study of fiction since Forster’s Aspects of the Novel—Financial Times

It is wonderful to be clued in to some of the magic tricks of the trade; the point of view, the stream of consciousness, the use of names, the sense of place, time-shift and intertextuality—Los Angeles Times

Lodge has the knack of wearing his scholarship lightly… One finds here precisely that expansive, humane wisdom which is so sorely lacking in much narrow-minded modern criticism…. He gets to the bottom of things, telling us why we read fiction….admirers will find in The Art of Fiction concentrated essence of Lodge—Guardian

These essays are as fresh and as readable as ever—David Evans, IndependentDavid Lodge is the author of ten previous novels, a trilogy of plays and a novella. He has also written stage plays screenplays and numerous works of literary criticism. His books have been translated into twenty-five languages. He is Honorary Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Birmingham, where he taught for many years, and lives in that city. David Lodge’s books have sold over 2.5 million copies.GB

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