Table of Contents

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)
22. The Experimental Novel (Henry Green)
23. The Comic Novel (Kingsley Amis)
24. Magic Realism (Milan Kundera)
25. Staying on the Surface (Malcolm Bradbury)
26. Showing and Telling (Henry Fielding)
27. Telling in Different Voices (Fay Weldon)
28. A Sense of the Past (John Fowles)
29. Imagining the Future (George Orwell)
30. Symbolism (D. H. Lawrence)
31. Allegory (Samuel Butler)
32. Epiphany (John Updike)
33. Coincidence (Henry James)
34. The Unreliable Narrator (Kazuo Ishiguro)
35. The Exotic (Graham Greene)
36. Chapters etc. (Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot, James Joyce)
37. The Telephone (Evelyn Waugh)
38. Surrealism (Leonora Carrington)
39. Irony (Arnold Bennett)
40. Motivation (George Eliot)
41. Duration (Donald Barthelme)
42. Implication (William Cooper)
43. The Title (George Gissing)
44. Ideas (Anthony Burgess)
45. The Non-Fiction Novel (Thomas Carlyle)
46. Metafiction (John Barth)
47. The Uncanny (Edgar Allan Poe)
48. Narrative Structure (Leonard Michaels)
49. Aporia (Samuel Beckett)
50. Ending (Jane Austen, William Golding)
Bibliography of primary sources
Index of Names

About the Author

David Lodge has written many bestselling novels, including THINKS and NICE WORK. His books have sold well over a million copies in Penguin. Formerly Professor of English at Birmingham University, he now writes full-time. He continues to live in Birmingham.

Reviews

British novelist Lodge ( Paradise News ) retired in 1987 from Birmingham University's English faculty and swore off academic prose, but in 1991 he consented to contribute a series of columns ``of interest to a more general reading public'' to the London Independent . Each of these 50 essays begins with a brief fiction passage, addressed and interpreted topically by Lodge, who discusses point of view, the unreliable narrator, ``the uncanny,'' ``weather'' and other aspects of writing. For example, in Chapter 19, ``Repetition,'' he observes that while Hemingway is famous for the ``charged simplicity'' of his reiterated words or phrases, repetition brings a special flavor to the work of writers as various as Dickens, Lawrence and Martin Amis--and he proves it. The selections are varied, although perhaps slanted to favor gentility (Austen and Nabokov, not Meredith or Dreiser), and tend to verify the opinion that ``the novel has always been centrally concerned with erotic attraction and desire.'' Lodge may be working a bit below full capacity here, but apart from serving as a genial companion, he defines terms of the novelist's craft so deftly and concisely that this pleasurable browse could rescue (or replace) many a college syllabus. (July)