Books like How to Analyze Fiction by William Kenney

Francine Prose shows how studying great writers—from Dostoyevsky to Joyce—reveals the craft of storytelling, urging readers to analyze language and technique in order to improve their own writing.

"One of the most successful literary lies," declares Margaret Anne Doody, "is the English claim to have invented the novel.... One of the best-kept literary secrets is the existence of novels in antiquity." In fact, as Doody goes on to demonstrate, the Novel of the Roman Empire is a joint product of Africa, Western Asia, and Europe. It is with this argument that The True Story of the Novel devastates and reconfigures the history of the novel as we know it. Twentieth-century historians and critics defending the novel have emphasized its role as superseding something else, as a sort of legitimate usurper that deposed the Epic, a replacement of myth, or religious narrative. To say that the Age of Early Christianity was really also the Age of the Novel rumples such historical tidiness - but so it was. From the outset of her discussion, Doody rejects the conventional Anglo-Saxon distinction between Romance and Novel. This eighteenth-century distinction, she maintains, served both to keep the foreign - dark-skinned peoples, strange speakers, Muslims, and others - largely out of literature and to obscure the diverse nature of the novel itself. This deeply informed and truly comparative work is staggering in its breadth. Doody treats not only recognized classics, but also works of usually unacknowledged subgenres - new readings of novels like The Pickwick Papers, Pudd'nhead Wilson, L'Assommoir, Death in Venice, and Beloved are accompanied by insights into Death on the Nile or The Wind in the Willows. Non-Western writers like Chinua Achebe and Witi Ihimaera are also included. In her last section, Doody goes on to show that Chinese and Japanese novels, early and late, bear a strong and not incidental affinity to their Western counterparts. Collectively, these readings offer the basis for a serious reassessment of the history and the nature of the novel.

"The articles with which David Lodge entertained and enlightened readers of the Independent on Sunday and The Washington Post are now revised, expanded and collected together in book form. The art of fiction is considered under a wide range of headings, such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Time-shift, Magical Realism and Symbolism, and each topic is illustrated by a passage or two taken from classic or modern fiction. Drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James and Martin Amis, Jane Austen and Fay Weldon and Henry Fielding and James Joyce, David Lodge makes accessible to the general reader the richness and variety of British and American fiction. Technical terms, such as Interior Monologue, Metafiction, Intertextuality and the Unreliable Narrator, are lucidly explained and their application demonstrated. Bringing to criticism the verve and humour of his own novels, David Lodge has provided essential reading for students of literature, aspirant writers, and anyone who wishes to understand how literature works."--Publisher's website.