Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways: Get help with access Institutional accessĪccess to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. This indicates not only that Wood is happy to practise the type of ‘self-plagiarism’ that he detects (and defends) in Tolstoy, Stendhal, Dickens, and James, but also that How Fiction Works is a retrospective, consolidating work, designed, I think, to elucidate and restate some of the principles offered in Wood's earlier essays. The first of these examples appeared in his New York Times review of a biography of Flaubert the second is found in the introduction to The Broken Estate. The richness of metaphor we find in Wood's writing is, then, more than a pleasing stylistic feature it is central to his evaluative and expository procedures as a critic. When, later in the book, he argues that all forms of modern prose narrative have their origins in realism, he states that realism ‘schools its own truants’.

In How Fiction Works Wood makes the reader look afresh at a well-known, critical judgement – Flaubert's importance to modern realist narrative: ‘Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him’. 'Should find a place on every novel-lover's shelf.In an essay on Virginia Woolf in James Wood's first collection of essays, The Broken Estate (1999), the critic argued that all criticism is metaphorical in tendency because it continually asks what a work is like.

Playful and profound, it incisively sums up two decades of bold, often controversial, and now classic critical work, and will be enlightening to writers, readers, and anyone interested in what happens on the page.

Wood ranges widely, from Homer to Beatrix Potter, from the Bible to John Le Carré, and his book is both a study of the techniques of fiction-making and an alternative history of the novel. In his first full-length book of criticism, one of the most prominent critics of our time takes the machinery of story-telling apart to ask a series of fundamental questions. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, How Fiction Works is a study of the main elements of fiction, such as narrative, detail, characterization, dialogue, realism, and style. Why do most endings of novels disappoint? What do we mean when we say we 'know' a fictional character? literary critic we have' ( New York Review of Books) in this new revised 10th anniversary edition. Rediscover this deep, practical anatomy of the novel from 'the strongest.

How fiction works by james wood