The Alexander Lectures for 1949-50. In his Preface, Professor Brown says, "Isolating a single element or group of elements in the novel, and considering it in unreal separation from all the other elements which it actually fuses, is artificial, but so is all criticism. The artificiality is justified if when one turns back from the criticism to the novels these appear more intelligible and more delightful. That is the test." Applying the test to Dr. Brown's present work, the method is more ...

A legendary exposition of rhythm in the novel by noted Canadian & American critic; E K Brown.

In the tradition of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, James Wood's How Fiction Works is a scintillating study of the magic of fiction--an analysis of its main elements and a celebration of its lasting power.Here one of the most prominent and stylish critics of our time looks into the machinery of storytelling to ask some fundamental questions: What do we mean when we say we "know" a fictional c...

The renowned British novelist's "casual and wittily acute guidance" on reading—and writing—great fiction ( Harper's Magazine).Renowned for such classics as A Room with a View, Howards End, and A Passage to India, E. M. Forster was one of Britain's—and the world's—most distinguished fiction writers, a frequent nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In this collection of lectures delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1927...

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, settingrecent f...

The 700-year history of the novel in English defies straightforward telling. Geographically and culturally boundless, with contributions from Great Britain, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, India, the Caribbean, and Southern Africa; influenced by great novelists working in other languages; and encompassing a range of genres, the story of the novel in English unfolds like a richly varied landscape that invites exploration rather than a linear journey. In The Novel: A Biography,...

'This is the saddest story I have ever heard.' Wealthy American John Dowell describes in a disarmingly casual, compellingly intimate manner how he and his wife Florence meet an English couple in a German spa resort. They become friends over the years and gradually the history of their relationships and the passions that lie behind the orderly Edwardian façade are unveiled. Dowell is the archetypal 'unreliable narrator', and his casual revelations are both unexpected and ex...

The Moment, and Other Essays gathers Virginia Woolf's occasional prose—reviews, critical reflections, and brief meditations—into a volume that displays her extraordinary ability to transform the essay into an art of perception. Moving between literary criticism, social observation, and lyrical reverie, the collection reveals Woolf's modernist preoccupation with consciousness, time, memory, and the elusive intensity of lived experience. Its style is supple and exploratory, poised between in...

Dame Edith Sitwell died while this autobiography was in the course of printing. One of the last acts of her life was to approve the 'specimen page' from the printer. She did not live to correct her proofs and what, if any, changes she might have made is a matter for conjecture. The book, as she wrote it, must now stand as the last prose work to come from a great writer of the last century and a wise, witty and compassionate woman. 'I trust', she wrote, 'that I have hurt nobody.'Dam...

The Lifted Veil (1859) is now one of the most widely read and critically discussed of Eliot's works. - ;`She had believed that my wild poet's passion for her would make me her slave; and that, being her slave, I should execute her will in all things.' The Lifted Veil was first published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1859. A dark fantasy woven from contemporary scientific interest in the physiology of the brain, mesmerism, phrenology and experiments in revification it is Eliot's anatomy of her...

The Beast in the Jungle is a 1903 novella by Henry James, first published as part of the collection, The Better Sort. Almost universally considered one of James' finest short narratives, this story treats appropriately universal themes: loneliness, fate, love and death. The parable of John Marcher and his peculiar destiny has spoken to many readers who have speculated on the worth and meaning of human life. Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Nihilism, Modernism, and Value consists of three jargon-free lectures addressed to the general reader. It explores a variety of ways in which writers responded to the phenomenon of nihilism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, By "nihilism" here is meant a sense, at times paralyzing, of the instability and perhaps groundlessness of all values. The book goes into some of the factors— psychological, sociological, philosophical—involved in that destabilizing. But its principal focus is on re...