The Art Of Fiction (book)
The Art of Fiction is a book of literary criticism by the British novelist David Lodge. The chapters of the book first appeared in 1991-1992 as weekly columns in The Independent on Sunday and were eventually gathered into book form and published in 1992. The essays as they appear in the book have in many cases been expanded from their original format.
Lodge focuses each chapter upon one aspect of the art of fiction, comprising some fifty topics. Every chapter also begins with a passage from classic or modern literature that Lodge feels embodies the technique or topic at hand. Some of the topics Lodge analyzes are Beginning (the first chapter), The Intrusive Author, The Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism, Irony and Metafiction. Among the authors he quotes in order to illustrate his points are Jane Austen, J. D. Salinger, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Martin Amis, F. Scott Fitzgerald and even himself.
Read more about The Art Of Fiction (book): Chapters
Famous quotes containing the words art and/or fiction:
“Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold
A sheephook, or have learn’d ought else the least
That to the faithful herdman’s art belongs!
What recks it them? What need they? They are sped.
And when they list their lean and flashy songs
Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw,
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send cheques to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)