The Art of Fiction (book)

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The Art of Fiction

First edition
Author	David Lodge
Language	English
Publisher	Secker & Warburg
Publication date	October 12, 1992
Publication place	United Kingdom
Media type	Print (hardcover, paperback)
Pages	224 pp (hardcover)
ISBN	0-436-25671-1
OCLC	29360234
Dewey Decimal	823.009 20
LC Class	PR826 .L63 1992
Preceded by	Paradise News
Followed by	Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader

The Art of Fiction is a book of literary criticism by the British academic and novelist David Lodge.^[1] 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 pertaining to novels or short stories by English and American writers. 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, symbolism, 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. In the preface of the book, Lodge informs that this book is for the general reader but technical vocabulary has been used deliberately to educate the reader. He further adds that the alternative title of the book would have been "The Rhetoric of Fiction" had it not been used already by writer Wayne Booth.