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How Novels Work (Hardback)
$18.29 - Save $2.03 (9%) - RRP $20.32 Free delivery worldwide (to United States and
all these other countries) Usually dispatched within 24 hours | |Short Description for How Novels WorkUsing examples from popular novels, this work examines the techniques by which fiction works. It explains how the pleasures of novel reading often come from the formal ingenuity of the novelist. It addresses those who are interested in the close reading of fiction, and shows that literary criticism is something that fiction enthusiasts can do.
Full description- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Published: 12 October 2006
- Format: Hardback 368 pages
- See: Full bibliographic data
- Categories: Literary Theory | Literary Studies: From C 1900 - | Literary Studies: Fiction, Novelists & Prose Writers
- ISBN 13: 9780199281770 ISBN 10: 0199281777
- Sales rank: 63,688
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Our reviews for How Novels Work
How Novels Work
The astonishing popularity of reading groups, and their recent rise as staple social event for the book-reading middle classes, has meant that publishers are falling over themselves to direct their wares towards them. Additional, meta-textual information (like author interviews, plot syposes and/or sample questions to get one thinking about the text in new ways) is now regularly appended to novels and books to help book-clubbers gain the werewithal to fully participate in the informed literary gossiping of their gatherings. John Mullan's popular Elements of Fiction column in the Guardian newspaper, where each week he looks at the building blocks of a modern, popular novel, is further proof that analysis and close-reading is a skill many voracious readers want to learn. In How Novels Work, a book resolutely aimed at the reading group market, but which deserves wider readership still, Mullan has reorganised and embellished the material from his newspaper column and set out wonderfully concise explanations of beginnings and endings, genre and style, narration and structure, and the like. He also does a good job untangling other devices such as metanarrative, prolepsis and amplification. Whilst one might argue with Mullan's reduction of the novel to the elements he describes -- novels are capacious beasts and being neat about them is always dangerous -- and with the modern canon with which he mostly concerns himself, to do so would be to be quite grudgingly pedantic. Despite occasional unevenness, How Novels Work is a great introduction to, well, how novels work! by Mark Thwaite
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