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The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts | 
 enlarge | Author: David Lodge
Publisher: Penguin
Category: Book
List Price: £8.99
Buy New: £3.71
You Save: £5.28 (59%)
New (45) Used (27) from £1.67
Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 7499
Media: Paperback
Pages: 256
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 0.8
ISBN: 0140174923
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.009
EAN: 9780140174922
ASIN: 0140174923
Publication Date: July 28, 1994
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 Horrible November 19, 2008
TV Fan
The book might be cheap but it isn't worth the amount of money asked. I thought I would get an idea how to write a novel, just some insight and advise, and instead I get nothing. The author with great care, talks about ancient books, that are probably very important books, but are of no relevance really to anyone trying to write for fun and in our current century.
I don't need to know who or why someone wrote something in 100 years ago and while Jane Astin was an excellent writer, I don't want to know about her style or what it is called.
I had been looking for some qualified advise what to do in writing a story and what not to do, what techniques to apply and how certain sentence structurs could be used, I do not care to know how ancient English worked.
Therefore, while the book is most certainly well researched and if there is an interest in how or why some writers from a long time ago chose to write in a certain way, then I would recommend it but otherwise, it is a waste of money.
No valid points I can use for myself, just grief that I have wasted my money on it.
And I never leave any comments like this but this time, I felt I really had to.
 Indispensable for the novelist December 14, 2007
Michael J. Hunt (England)
Terms are bandied around for different forms of novel writing, and you dismiss them as 'jargon', or perhaps 'gobbledegook', and move on. It's only when you've actually written a novel that doesn't fit the standard genre - historical, fantasy, adventure, thriller, etc - that you wish you'd paid more attention. If you've completed writing such a book without having recourse to the Art of Fiction, you'll need it at this point, otherwise you might be excused for thinking you've ploughed a completely new literary furrow. So, before you start preparing your witty acceptance speech on winning the Booker, do read David Lodge and you'll learn that someone famous has been there before you and that, in some cases, they have been lauded and slated by the critics in equal proportions.
You'll learn about Magic Realism, Stream of Consciousness, The Reader in the Text, Teenage Skaz etc etc. There's much in the Art of Fiction for the more orthodox writer, too. His essays are beautifully written, very clear and he uses well-known illustrative texts. I can thoroughly recommend this one for the discerning writer and reader.
Interesting and insightful July 9, 2007
J. Aitcheson (Wiltshire, England)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
"The Art of Fiction" is divided into 50 chapters, each devoted to a different aspect or theme in fiction (in this case primarily novel-writing). Some of these themes are standard topics: 'Beginning', 'Point of View', 'Introducing a Character', 'Chapters' and 'Ending' for example. Others are more unusual: including 'Suspense', 'Symbolism', 'Epiphany', 'The Telephone' as well as more technical-sounding topics such as 'Aporia' and 'Intertextuality'. Through these themes Lodge explores the construction of the novel and underlines the sheer variety of approaches taken by different writers over the course of time.
Each chapter is drawn from an article in Lodge's own newspaper column, which means that the subject matter is easily accessible and digestible for the casual reader. Lodge's style is easy to read and follow and he occasionally intersperses his analysis with his own anecdotes. This is 'a book to browse in, and dip into', as Lodge himself explains, which assumes very little prior knowledge of the texts concerned. Indeed his subjects are very diverse, ranging from Henry Fielding in the 18th century, and Victorian writers such as Brontė and Dickens, all the way to 20th-century authors including, among many others, George Orwell and Kazuo Ishiguro. However, it is not necessary to have read all - or even any - of these texts, as Lodge begins each chapter with a relevant passage quoted in full to illustrate his point.
The goal of "The Art of Fiction" is to enhance the reader's understanding of modern literature, and not explicitly to teach lessons in composition to aspiring authors. Nevertheless, for any writer it is always instructive to dissect those works which have gone before, and this book would therefore be of tremendous use.
Everything considered, "The Art of Fiction" is a worthy addition to the bookshelf of anyone with an interest in deconstructing how modern fiction works - either the casual reader or the student. Recommended.
Interesting and insightful June 23, 2007
J. Aitcheson (Wiltshire, England)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"The Art of Fiction" is divided into 50 chapters, each devoted to a different aspect or theme in fiction (in this case primarily novel-writing). Some of these themes are standard topics: 'Beginning', 'Point of View', 'Introducing a Character', 'Chapters' and 'Ending' for example. Others are more unusual: including 'Suspense', 'Symbolism', 'Epiphany', 'The Telephone' as well as more technical-sounding topics such as 'Aporia' and 'Intertextuality'. Through these themes Lodge explores the construction of the novel and underlines the sheer variety of approaches taken by different writers over the course of time.
Each chapter is drawn from an article in Lodge's own newspaper column, which means that the subject matter is easily accessible and digestible for the casual reader. Lodge's style is easy to read and follow and he occasionally intersperses his analysis with his own anecdotes. This is 'a book to browse in, and dip into', as Lodge himself explains, which assumes very little prior knowledge of the texts concerned. Indeed his subjects are very diverse, ranging from Henry Fielding in the 18th century, and Victorian writers such as Brontė and Dickens, all the way to 20th-century authors including, among many others, George Orwell and Kazuo Ishiguro. However, it is not necessary to have read all - or even any - of these texts, as Lodge begins each chapter with a relevant passage quoted in full to illustrate his point.
The goal of "The Art of Fiction" is to enhance the reader's understanding of modern literature, and not explicitly to teach lessons in composition to aspiring authors. Nevertheless, for any writer it is always instructive to dissect those works which have gone before, and this book would therefore be of tremendous use.
Everything considered, "The Art of Fiction" is a worthy addition to the bookshelf of anyone with an interest in deconstructing how modern fiction works - either the casual reader or the student. Recommended.
Modest and magisterial September 25, 2006
jfp2006 (PARIS/France)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
This must surely be one of the most astute crossover books ever: originally conceived as a series of newspaper articles, these fifty chapters make the sometimes forbidding and austere discipline of literary criticism accessible to the general reader.
David Lodge is no stranger to negotiating such crossovers: his comic novels have reached a wide readership while fitting perfectly into the tradition of the English comic novel, about which Lodge, for many years a professor of modern literature, knows more than most people. In "The Art of Fiction", he draws on a wider range of examples than in his other, more academically slanted, works of literary criticism. Each of the fifty chapters begins with an extract [occasionally more than one] from novels, or, occasionally, short stories. The majority of his choices are from twentieth-century British fiction [Kingsley Amis, Virginia Woolf, Muriel Spark, Evelyn Waugh...], but there are also incursions into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and into American and Irish literature. The extracts serve as introductions to aspects of fiction as varied as: symbolism, allegory, time-shift, motivation, irony, and the author is always at pains to link his extract to other literary works.
The overall result is both modest and magisterial. As David Lodge points out in his introduction, "this is a book for people who prefer to take their Lit.Crit. in small doses, a book to browse in, and dip into". His approach works brilliantly: this book is an invaluable source of inspiration. Most important of all, it doesn't matter if you haven't read the novels from which Lodge has chosen his illustrations; the whole point is that in many cases you almost certainly will want to read them soon.
A modern classic in a category all of its own.
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