&sq=&lang=&file=File:Question_book-new.svg){kind=small} | This article needs additional citations for verification. (June 2024) |
&sq=&lang=&file=File:TheArtOfFiction.jpg) 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 |
| 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.
- ^ McLemee, Scott (2002). "David Lodge Thinks". Chronicle of Higher Education. 49 (10) – via EBSCOHost.