The Art of Fiction (1992)

The Art of Fiction is a book of literary criticism by the British academic and 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 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.

Chapters

Beginning Jane Austen Emma, Ford Madox Ford, " Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich ..."

The Intrusive Author George Eliot, E. M. Forster

Suspense Thomas Hardy

Teenage Skaz J. D. Salinger

The Epistolary Novel Michael Frayn

Point of View Henry James

Mystery Rudyard Kipling

Names David Lodge, Paul Auster

The Stream of Consciousness Virginia Woolf

Interior Monologue James Joyce

Defamiliarisation Charlotte Brontë

The Sense of Place Martin Amis

Lists F. Scott Fitzgerald

Introducing a Character Christopher Isherwood

Surprise William Makepeace Thackeray

Time-Shift Muriel Spark

The Reader in the Text Laurence Sterne

Weather Jane Austen, Charles Dickens

Repetition Ernest Hemingway

Fancy Prose Vladimir Nabokov

Intertextuality Joseph Conrad

The Experimental Novel Henry Green

The Comic Novel Kingsley Amis

Magic Realism Milan Kundera

Staying on the Surface Malcolm Bradbury

Showing and Telling Henry Fielding

Telling in Different Voices Fay Weldon

A Sense of the Past John Fowles

Imagining the Future George Orwell

Symbolism D. H. Lawrence

Allegory Samuel Butler

Epiphany John Updike

Coincidence Henry James

The Unreliable Narrator Kazuo Ishiguro

The Exotic Graham Greene

Chapters etc. Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, Walter Scott, George Eliot, James Joyce

The Telephone Evelyn Waugh

Surrealism Leonora Carrington

Irony Arnold Bennett

Motivation George Eliot

Duration Donald Barthelme

Implication William Cooper

The Title George Gissing

Ideas Anthony Burgess

The Non-Fiction Novel Thomas Carlyle

Metafiction John Barth

The Uncanny Edgar Allan Poe

Narrative Structure Leonard Michaels

Aporia Samuel Beckett

Ending Jane Austen, William Golding