How Novels WorkOUP Oxford, 2008/02/14 - 368 ページ Never has contemporary fiction been more widely discussed and passionately analysed; recent years have seen a huge growth in the number of reading groups and in the interest of a non-academic readership in the discussion of how novels work. Drawing on his weekly Guardian column, 'Elements of Fiction', John Mullan examines novels mostly of the last ten years, many of which have become firm favourites with reading groups. He reveals the rich resources of novelistic technique, setting recent fiction alongside classics of the past. Nick Hornby's adoption of a female narrator is compared to Daniel Defoe's; Ian McEwan's use of weather is set against Austen's and Hardy's; Carole Shield's chapter divisions are likened to Fanny Burney's. Each section shows how some basic element of fiction is used. Some topics (like plot, dialogue, or location) will appear familiar to most novel readers; others (metanarrative, prolepsis, amplification) will open readers' eyes to new ways of understanding and appreciating the writer's craft. How Novels Work explains how the pleasures of novel reading often come from the formal ingenuity of the novelist. It is an entertaining and stimulating exploration of that ingenuity. Addressed to anyone who is interested in the close reading of fiction, it makes visible techniques and effects we are often only half-aware of as we read. It shows that literary criticism is something that all fiction enthusiasts can do. Contemporary novels discussed include: Monica Ali's Brick Lane; Martin Amis's Money; Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin; A.S. Byatt's Possession; Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club; J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace; Michael Cunningham's The Hours; Don DeLillo's Underworld; Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White; Ian Fleming's From Russia with Love; Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections; Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time; Patricia Highsmith's Ripley under Ground; Alan Hollinghurst's The Spell; Nick Hornby's How to Be Good; Ian McEwan's Atonement; John le Carré's The Constant Gardener; Andrea Levy's Small Island; David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas; Andrew O'Hagan's Personality; Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red; Ann Patchett's Bel Canto; Ruth Rendell's Adam and Eve and Pinch Me; Philip Roth's The Human Stain; Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated; Carol Shields's Unless; Zadie Smith's White Teeth; Muriel Spark's Aiding and Abetting; Graham Swift's Last Orders; Donna Tartt's The Secret History; William Trevor's The Hill Bachelors; and Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road . |
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3 ページ
... become the stuff of public debate, however facile that debate might sometimes be. The best known, though not the richest, of these prizes, the Booker Prize, has lent itself as an adjective to characterize a certain kind of novel ...
... become the stuff of public debate, however facile that debate might sometimes be. The best known, though not the richest, of these prizes, the Booker Prize, has lent itself as an adjective to characterize a certain kind of novel ...
4 ページ
... become a potential news item. Some of this is created by publicists and is mere hype, but it is not all commercial manipulation. The growth of reading groups, for instance, was not created by marketing departments. The extraordinary ...
... become a potential news item. Some of this is created by publicists and is mere hype, but it is not all commercial manipulation. The growth of reading groups, for instance, was not created by marketing departments. The extraordinary ...
11 ページ
... become. We might note that the original, purporting to be a version of the anti-heroine's own story, does not even have Defoe's name upon it. Its place on the library shelf was decided by publishers and readers long after its author's ...
... become. We might note that the original, purporting to be a version of the anti-heroine's own story, does not even have Defoe's name upon it. Its place on the library shelf was decided by publishers and readers long after its author's ...
19 ページ
... become a 'dogman'. (Not since King Lear have there been so many references in a literary work to the analogies between humans and dogs.) He observes that the condemned dogs 'flatten their ears' and 'droop their tails', 'as if they too ...
... become a 'dogman'. (Not since King Lear have there been so many references in a literary work to the analogies between humans and dogs.) He observes that the condemned dogs 'flatten their ears' and 'droop their tails', 'as if they too ...
23 ページ
... become our cliché about 'innocent' Victorian femininity: think of the sexually fearful Victorian wife in A. S. Byatt's Possession who drives her husband to infidelity.) Sugar may be 'crimson'—a scarlet woman, no less—but she longs for a ...
... become our cliché about 'innocent' Victorian femininity: think of the sexually fearful Victorian wife in A. S. Byatt's Possession who drives her husband to infidelity.) Sugar may be 'crimson'—a scarlet woman, no less—but she longs for a ...
目次
1 | |
9 | |
2 Narrating | 40 |
3 People | 79 |
4 Genre | 105 |
5 Voices | 127 |
6 Structure | 155 |
7 Detail | 189 |
8 Style | 213 |
9 Devices | 251 |
10 Literariness | 284 |
11 Ending | 303 |
Notes | 321 |
Select Bibliography | 327 |
Index | 337 |
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多く使われている語句
academic acters Austen become begins Blind Assassin Byatt called century chapter character’s characters Christopher Clarissa clichés Cloud Atlas Coleman comic Constant Gardener critics Cunningham’s Dalloway daughter David David Copperfield David Lodge death Defoe’s DeLillo dialogue Dickens disgrace Eliot English epigraph example Faber father feel fiction first-person free indirect speech genre gives head Henry James Human Stain husband imagine invented Jane Jane Austen Jane Eyre Jonathan kind language letters literary lives looks lover Lucan Middlemarch Minty murder mystery narrator narrator’s Nathan Nathan Zuckerman Nazneen never Nick novel novelist opening paragraph parataxis person plot present tense prose protagonist quotation reader recalls Reta Ripley Ripley’s Romance Roth’s satirical seems sense sentence Shields’s sometimes speak speech story talk tells things thoughts tion told Tom Jones truth Victorian villain voice wants wife woman Woolf’s words writing