James agrees that characters must be understandable and relatable, but instead of suggesting that this requires a description of a character's facial hair, he argues that there are myriad ways to describe a character that will make them believable to an audience. Please relate... "Fiction is an Art in every way worthy to be called the sister and the equal of the Arts of Painting, Sculpture, Music, and Poetry", "That it is an Art which, like them, is governed and directed by general laws; and that these laws may be laid down and taught with as much precision and exactness as the laws of harmony, perspective, and proportion. Much as Edgar Allan Poe did for the short story a generation earlier, James establishes the novel as a serious artistic genre, identifies its unique characteristics, and lays out the fundamental principles for its critical analysis. The essays as they appear in the book have in many cases been expanded from their original format. Short, manageable chunks of stuff that makes me want to read lots of classic novels, which can’t be bad. Some of the topics Lodge analyzes are Beginning (the first chapter), The Intrusive Author, The Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism, Irony, symbolism, and Metafiction. The Art of Fiction is a book of literary criticism by the British academic and novelist David Lodge. James, on the other hand, feels that a story must be interesting and that a set of rules dictating what constitutes a moral storyline remove the art from the story. 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. Salinger, from Jane Austen to Fay Weldon, from Charles Dickens to Martin Amis. $22.00 The articles with which David Lodge entertained and delighted readers of the Independent and The Washington Post Book World for fifty weeks between 1991 and 1992 have now been revised, expanded, and collected together in book form. Besant dictates that characters should be clearly illustrated, and he goes on to create a list of rules that designate clear illustration. Nice to read it again. LibraryThing is a cataloging and social networking site for booklovers ", "Fiction is so far removed from the mere mechanical arts, that no laws or rules whatever can teach it to those who have not already been endowed with the natural and necessary gifts. Already a member? "The Art of Fiction" is Henry James's attempt to rebuke the claims made in Sir Walter Besant's lecture "Fiction as One of the Fine Arts.". Log in here. 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. Please explain for me what you think James meant when he wrote the following in "The Art of Fiction": "A novel is a living thing, all one and... How does Henry James's essay, "The Art of Fiction" relate to the nineteenth-century debates about the nature and function of fiction? A true artist will not be able to create an interesting story without imbibing morals into it. James argues that while it's true that writers should write what they know, this does not pigeonhole them into only writing about what they themselves have done from their own perspective. ©2020 eNotes.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved. He suggests they do what feels, looks, and sounds real rather than what feels, looks, or sounds right. Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction” remains one of the most influential statements on the theory of the novel. It's the second point that James disagrees with, as he sets out to prove in his essay. 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. Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich ...", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Art_of_Fiction_(book)&oldid=966311319, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 6 July 2020, at 11:01. 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. eNotes.com will help you with any book or any question. The essays as they appear in the book have in many cases been expanded from their original format. Besant argued that fiction required both talent and the following of certain rules that govern the creation of an appropriate piece.